Another day up at Brooklyn Yard
Once again, I took the #17 bus across the river and got off at the stop by the north end of Brooklyn Yard to see if anything interesting was about to happen. I'd been bashing on a new Linux kernel all day, so I was running late and I got off at the Haig & 17th stop at ~5:50pm. There was something there; a string of yellow horde engines being switched from the mainline into the yard, which were worth being photographed before they moved back out of sight into the yard.
After these engines disappeared, I looked at my watch and saw it was about 6pm. I wasn't hearing any Amtrak-ish whistles, so I walked over to the bus stop to see when the next bus was due. It said it was due at about 6:05, so I was thinking that I should just stop and wait for the bus when I heard an enthusiastic TOOT TOOT TOOOOOOOOT TOOOT and the rumble of a late-model EMD engine accellerating a train. I bolted across 17th and ran down Haig until I reached the (ex-)railroad crossing, just in time to see Amtrak train 507 come hurling around the corner as fast as its little feetsies could carry it.
I'd been playing around with shutter speeds, so the poor Pentax was having trouble properly focussing on the fast-moving eng. After a couple of red-box-but-no beeps, I flipped the camera to manual focus and got a string of fast-moving green blurs until the engine went flying past me, and then, by pure blind luck, it was close enough so that I couldn't focus as fast as it was moving and thus ended up with a photo that was actually (mostly) focused despite not looking like it while I was taking the picture.
