Old Flickr Rail Photos

I had caught up to the then-newly-restored LMS Jubilee Class "Leander" at the Return of the Legends train show at Crewe works earlier in 2003, but I only shot Kodachromes then. These shots, while quite brillant in color quality, were actually shot with Jessops Diamond 200, if I'm not mistaken. I got the film for free whenever I developed film with Jessops, so by late 2003 I was shooting quite a bit of it. All of these shots were on the East Lancashire Railway, where Leander eventually ended up in excursion service.

Mixed power was still a bit rare on the Water Level Route in 2000, but getting more common all the time with the Conrail sale and the subsequent explosion in traffic. This consist, though, was still something special, as it had a G.E. Dash 7 still in Family Lines colors!! I caught this in Little Falls, NY while out train chasing.

Here's one of my favorite all-time shots on the Water Level Route, with Amtrak leading an Empire Service train out of the notorious Gulf Curve!! I've always though this was quite dramatic, even if some serious photographers consider it boring.

I took this shot during the aftermath and cleanup of a major wreck in Utica, NY involving a loaded stack train headed by G.E. Dash 8s. The Dash 8s are gone by this point, with the smashed well cars and containers bulldozed to the side, and one track has been reopened, letting these GP40-2s through, rare even by 1993 standards. The wreck, according to the news reports, was deliberately caused by a group of teenagers, who were subsequently arrested for the crime, but the results of the case were kept secret because of their ages. One person, perhaps not the smartest person in the world, blamed it on the railroad, saying something along the lines of "I don't know why they put the railroad so close to the housing development." The housing development where the teenagers came from dated to the 1960s, the railroad to the 1830s.

The Cable Cars of the San Francisco Municipal Railway Powell & Hyde Line run from the corner of Powell and Market Streets to Beach, which is actually a beach on San Francisco Bay rather than on the Pacific Ocean, near Aquatic Park. There, a turntable allows them to change direction, as they aren't uni-directional. The momentum of the moving cable car rolls it onto the turntable, as seen in Picture 1, the cable car is turned by hand, as in Pictures 2 and 3, and then the car is pushed back onto the active track, only for the opposite direction. It can then be reconnected to the cable upon departure.

The Cable Cars of the San Francisco Municipal Railway Powell & Hyde Line run from the corner of Powell and Market Streets to Beach, which is actually a beach on San Francisco Bay rather than on the Pacific Ocean, near Aquatic Park. There, a turntable allows them to change direction, as they aren't uni-directional. The momentum of the moving cable car rolls it onto the turntable, as seen in Picture 1, the cable car is turned by hand, as in Pictures 2 and 3, and then the car is pushed back onto the active track, only for the opposite direction. It can then be reconnected to the cable upon departure.

The Cable Cars of the San Francisco Municipal Railway Powell & Hyde Line run from the corner of Powell and Market Streets to Beach, which is actually a beach on San Francisco Bay rather than on the Pacific Ocean, near Aquatic Park. There, a turntable allows them to change direction, as they aren't uni-directional. The momentum of the moving cable car rolls it onto the turntable, as seen in Picture 1, the cable car is turned by hand, as in Pictures 2 and 3, and then the car is pushed back onto the active track, only for the opposite direction. It can then be reconnected to the cable upon departure.

Cable Cars aren't universally considered trams. That's the purpose that they serve, though, for all practical purposes. The main thing that makes them different from others is that standard trams are powered through overhead cantenary that powers electric traction motors that power each axle, whereas Cable Cars are pulled along by a cable underneath the street. You can check out www.cablecarguy.com for more technical info. In any case, I got my chance to ride and photograph the San Francisco Municipal Railway, the last of the traditional Cable Car systems, in 1993. All of the other surviving systems operate on the less-standard "funicular system," used on steep hills. Unlike a standard cable car system, a funicular is limited by the fact that the cable is connected to both cars (all TWO! :-)) semi-permanently, so while one goes up the hill, the other goes down. This would never work in S.F., though, since it's a full-service system with many cars running on different streets. Therefore, the cables are controlled from a central cable house, pictured here on the right, which is also the San Francisco Cable Car Museum. The cars then can run semi-independently of the cable house's whims, controlling their access to the constantly moving cables under the street through the use of a "grip," that is sort of between a pliers and an automotive clutch. As such, cable car drivers are called "grip men (or perhaps women)."

I took this shot on a slightly snowy day in 2001 during my second to last full day living in Norwich, England. I figured I wouldn't get back anytime soon, so I shot a bunch of photos so that I would have them. In reality, I returned many times to visit friends, but I didn't know I would do so at the time. This is one of my best shots that day, a pan of one of Anglia's Intercities departing Thorpe Street for London Liverpool Street. These Class 86 electrics were originally designed in the mid-1960s for use on the newly-electrified West Coast Mainline, but when the Great Eastern Mainline was electrified in the 1980s they were mostly cascaded to the Great Eastern. When I first went to school in Norwich in 1998, nearly all had been transferred to this service, with few left on the West Coast, and now all are on the Great Eastern, if I'm not mistaken. I rode these trains many times, of course, and I would ride one out of Norwich two days later. As a point of side interest, the blurred locomotive in the upper right is a English, Welsh, & Scottish Class 67 diesel, a 125 m.p.h. locomotive used mainly on mail trains. It turns out that I was wise to catch this, as I don't think I got another shot of it before it was scrapped at Cardiff in October of 2004.

This shot looks difficult to get, but in actuality all I had to do to get it legally was point the lens through the chainlink fence. This is certainly a period shot at this point, though, as most railroads, especially Union Pacific, the current owners of this works, use diesels with safety cabs now. When I took this, though, this was a Southern Pacific facility, and if you look carefully to the left, you can see an EMD SD45 painted in the Kodachrome color scheme that was planned for the aborted Souther Pacific/Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe merger. These locomotives were a common sight in the 1980s and early 1990s, but now they're of course very, very rare, if there are any left at all. There are obviously some other locos in the photo too, but its the SD45 that really stands out to me.

It's obvious from the Fall colors that I shot this in the Fall of 1995, this being part of a larger National Railway Historical Society bus trip to various heritage rail sites in Southern New York and Central Pennsylvania. It is indeed ironic that the NRHS has to travel by bus most of the time, but that's life in a country with a substandard rail system. In the case of the Stourbridge Line, though, that's part of the appeal, of course, as they have this old and super-rare EMD BL2 diesel on their roster, which was the centerpoint of the trip. We rode it all the way over the line from Stourbridge to Lackawaxen (if memory serves), and this was at, I think the Stourbridge stop, or some other place. I do remember that this is where we got on, I'm pretty sure. Any info on this would be welcome, as this trip was 12 years ago, and I don't have my notes nearby. I hope you like the photo, anyway. :-)

You may remember this photo from my personal website, where I have had, at various times, a black and white scan of this. I recently did a color rescan, but the original print had been badly done, and naturally it was 13 years old when I scanned it. Therefore, I ran the photo through Adobe Photoshop LE to remove the excessive green cast, brighten it, and vastly increase the contrast, and now it looks alright, I think. It's more or less, finally, what I wanted it to be when I originally shot it.

I took this on one of my many trips to London, and until I found it in my collection a few weeks ago I had forgotten completely that I had it. I figure it should fit nicely into the various rail-oriented groups on Flickr, and interest a number of people, so why not post it? :-)

Back in 2000, mixed power was still rare enough so that you could get other railfans' attention by photographing it. It is, after all, a bit odd to see a CSX freight in Utica, NY being pulled by locomotives from the Canadian National and the Kansas City Southern. The trailing locomotive is a bit old already by modern standards as the lead locomotive, an SD75I, is trailed by an SD40-3.

I took this the very first time I watched trains (trainspotted??) in Britain!! It was a very exciting day, as I had never seen so many trains running at once, and doing it so well!! :-) This was during the first year of privatisation, but you couldn't see the negative effects of it at all yet. Most of it was still public-sector, and very clean and well-maintaintained. Waterloo was so spotless that day that it was a little bit hard to believe, and this mind you was without the dreadful experience of privatisation to compare it to. Instead, I was comparing it to Amtrak, which is a way is an even starker contrast when you think about it. These trains are EMUs, although I don't have my books handy to found out exactly which classes. Most of the BR Southern Region EMUs were, of course, a bit hard to tell from one another. If someone with books handy could fill me in I would be very grateful. :-)

I'm sure that many of you will recognize this photo from a previous post. As you'll recall, I had always intended to rescan this, so I had a photo lab do it, and here's the result. I hope you all like it. :-)

Here's the fatter of St. Pancras's two towers. I love the arches on it!! :-)

St. Pancras station, and the Midland Hotel which is incorporated into the front of the building, was arguably the most beautiful, spectacular commercial failure in the history of London when it was constructed in 1867. Overwhelmingly the most grandiose and beautiful of London's stations, it was redundant when (over)built, and a product of the rivalry between the various private companies vying for the London market during the mid-19th Century. The Midland Railway, the original owners, spent 2,000,000 pounds on its construction, enough so that the company never recoupped the loss, especially since someone made the blunder of building the hotel without modern plumbing!!! Although the station was built as a combination passenger and freight station, with the underground freight handling facilities specialising in overnight beer shipments, little of the station has ever been put into full use. This may have a happy ending, though, as since I took these photos the building has been undergoing a massive renovation to serve as a successor to Waterloo International once the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is built, with the old beer cellars being reused for dedicated international platforms and a car park.