A few days at Brooklyn Yard
I managed to talk briefly with a trainman today, and he claimed that the absolute lack of action at Brooklyn Yard was not because the Yellow Menace had gotten its act together, but that there'd been a train wreck in southern Oregon which had cut down on the amount of interstate traffic coming up from That Paradise That Is California. In any case, there's certainly been more traffic when I've gone by the yards in the afternoon (not a lot of traffic, but usually one or two trains parked and occasionally one on the move) this week.
On Monday, there was one train on the move; When I got off the #17 bus, I looked up and down 17th Ave to see if any traffic was coming before I crossed the street, and just as I looked north I saw two twinkies pop into sight on the Powell Street bridge. Where was my camera? In my purse. But I was able to yank it out and turn it on before the train reached Haig St, but, alas, I was still on the west side of the street, so the #70 bus pulled out into traffic and blocked my view just as the twinkies popped back into sight.
Whoopee! It's a Superliner!
On Tuesday, there was no Amtrak trains to be seen, but there was a Yellow Menace freight parked on the northbound main, waiting for clearance to proceed towards Albina yard on the north side of town. I waited a while, but it just sat there and burbled to itself.
Today, there wasn't even a train; a single unit was sitting on the yard lead waiting for clearance to run north. I decided that the poor windows machine in the library wasn't using enough cpu cycles, so I set the camera up to save images in raw mode instead of lightly compressed jpg and fired away.
I see, to my dismay, that the Pentax appears to be doing some colo(u)r correction on the images when it writes them as jpegs. If I had a (much) faster machine to do image mangling with, I'd save all my images in raw mode and mangle the colors by hand, but Irfanview doesn't deal at all well with PEF (Pentax raw format) files when it's only on a 1ghz P3.