New risks of trainspotting.
Don't try this at home, kids
Now that the Department of Homeland Hysteria has raised the mass transit threat level up to orange, I strongly suspect, but will leave as merely a thought experiment, that if I parked myself at 15th and Front and started aiming telephoto lenses at trains today, sitting on a public sidewalk would not stop the police from cheerfully arresting me and hauling me off to the station for a question or two. I don't even want to think what the Oregon and Washington state police would do with the 200 or so photographers who were chasing #700 and #4449 yesterday, or what the local railroad bulls would have done with the hundreds of photographers who were climbing all over railroad property to watch those two engines depart Portland yesterday.
Note that the new mass transit threat level doesn't include airplanes. Why? I dunno. Aside from the traditional carbomb, nobody in any Al Qaeda franchise seems to want to reuse the methods that were used in previous successful attacks against the west. After demolishing the WTC, they went to blowing up commuter trains, then they shifted over to subways and busses. Raising the hysteria level on interurban trains but not airplanes seems to be leaving a huge terrorsized hole in security.
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Sorry I keep posting, but you raise good questions. I have a flight coming up next week and I was surprised that flying (isn't that considered mass transit?) wasn't included in the "orange alert" advisory? I mean it was THE attack method of al-quaida (sp?) before. Oops, now we're probably being watched. (I didn't want to make that trip to Hawaii for the International Soccer Tournament anyway.)