Railroad Picture of the day
The Coast Starlight was running later than usual tonight, so I decided that I'd just go home without doing any trainspotting today. But when the #19 bus reached Milwaukie and Bybee, it was only about 17:30 and the online train arrival webpage said it would get into Union Station at 17:50. Hmmm. It only takes about 5 minutes for a passenger train to get from Milwaukie and Powell down to Union Station, and the train tends to blow through Brooklyn Yard at track speed, so if I went down to Westmoreland Park and planted myself on the Bybee Bridge I might be able to see the train from there. At worst, it would be a nice walk home from the park.
So I didn't pull the cord for my regular stop, but went down to the Westmoreland Park stop and walked up to the middle of the Bybee Bridge. Red signals to the south of me; good. Green over red to the north of me; good. No trains blocking both mains and the yard lead/departure siding; really good. And it was only 17:35.
10 minutes of waiting and what should appear but three headlights and eight tiny reindeer. Well, no, not really; it was just the #14 trying its best to make up lost time in a very photogenic fashion:
clickity click!
Comments
It’s not quite as good as you might think, because the Bybee bridge has got a tall mesh fence where it passes over the railroad tracks. I wasn’t working with very high magnification (135mm) but the uncropped photo of the incoming train has a large black smear up in one corner where the mesh clipped the lens.
I’ve tried taking pictures through that fence using the slow telephoto I got when I bought the Pentax, and even though that’s a smaller lens it still clips. I could probably fiddle with my positioning to avoid clipping, but I really didn’t think that I could use those pictures for anything other than warmup (I wanted to get the ¾ths view today because usually I’m so close to the track that all you see is the Eng!)
The first picture – the one that doesn’t link to larger image – looks like there is a mount of dirk in front of the train and the track jogs and stops.
Obviously an illusion. but it is funny to consider.
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Interesting… I’ve never shot from here but the track grade down under that next overpass is quite interesting… definitely a good location for a telesmash.