This Space for Rent

Trolley pictures of the day

After a long drought of not being able to get out of the office during the daytime due to pesky work getting in the way, my office went out to a group lunch in darkest Beaverton. I carpooled out there, but bowed out of carpooling back because the restaurant is about 600 feet away from the Beaverton Transit Center, and I'd not ridden a trolley on that side of the mountain for a while.

When I walked up to the station, an airport train was waiting to depart. I stopped to take a couple of pictures, and as I was taking them, it closed its doors and whisked off to the east. Not a great loss; the nice thing about the tri-met trolley lines is that they run trains on the interurban line every 10-15 minutes even during the off-peak hours, and I knew I wouldn't have to wait very long until another one came along.

The next train that came along was another Airport train, headed for this station. These trains lay over for a while at Beaverton, so there was no point for me to run over and get on it. I took a few pictures (from the same vantage point as the pictures of the airport train; I merely cropped this picture to be wider than the previous one) and turned around to see a Bombardier car leading an eastbound train.

Since I was right near the station, I just sat there and snapped pictures until the train went past me, then I turned and bolted for the station. This is not something that would necessarily work at just any old station, but trains tend to linger at the two downtown Beaverton stations (the Transit Center and the station in the middle of the Beaverton Round (which, amazingly, appears to have been completed now)), so I made it to the train with more than enough time to climb on board and sit down before the train departed.