Old Flickr Rail Photos

This is a difficult shot to get if you're not a railroad worker, as it's from the tower. I was with a tour group, so I was lucky. The whole place is amazing, as it is (or was at that time) the largest active railroad yard in the Eastern United States. I like the sky on this shot, too.

This shot goes with...well..."Union Pacific Coal Train From Berea Tower." This one is shot from the other end of the tower, after the head end passed, and gives us a view of the hoppers, which appear to be 49' 100-ton coal tri-hoppers.

Obviously, it's not possible to get a shot like this except for when you're on an organized tour! I was, however, one of the lucky ones. This train appears to be a UP unit coal train, and it was indeed a unit coal train, but I'm more than 90% certain the power was leased by Conrail, as these were Conrail tracks in 1997. I'm not aware of UP coming this far east...ever, and UP were a common lessor to Conrail in those days. Still it makes a cool title for my photo. :-)

This train, as incredible as it may seem, appears to be a reefer express, with a lashup of old 2nd Generation diesels to match (if you count SD50s and SD60s 2nd Generation, it's not very easy to identify all the power in this photo). In actuality, there isn't any evidence that this train was a genuine reefer express, as most of it is out of the picture.

The location of this photo is at least as obvious as the one above, since it has "Berea" and Berea Tower in the picture!! Actually, the scan isn't good enough to read the sign in this shot. I'm not aware of whether this train was the same manifest as in the previous shot with the water tower, but note that the locomotive is also a G.E. Dash 8-40CW.

I took this while on the same tour as when I took my older Berea Tower photo. I apologize for the poor resolution of the scan, but it's almost as old as the photo!

The Cafe Louvre was a favorite hangout of Franz Kafka, but it is only partly retro in feel. The crowd there today is relatively young, and basically there to party. I shot this photo with my Lomo 135BC, and was the first Lomo shot that I used my Polysix light meter with, as the exposure guide on the camera was useless at such a late hour of the day. Even then, I ended up with a major light leak on the photo, so I cropped it to square format.

Here's another, much wider, shot of Hlavni Nadrazi, albeit a dark one. I apologize for the darkness of this shot! :-)

I don't remember exactly when I took this, but I'm fairly certain it was in late 2005. One way or another, it's one of my better shots of Hlavni Nadrazi, the main train station for Prague, with a little bit of the "Sherwood Forest" yard. If you need to ask why it's called that, you don't want to know. The locomotive doing switching is, if I'm not mistaken, a CD Class 111 electric.

I took this on an Easter weekend trip to Cheb, a border town in West Bohemia, in the famed (or infamous) Sudetenland. This train appears to work a cross-border service, although I must admit that I don't know much about Vogtlandbahn. Any info would be helpful.

Apologies to everyone for all the trouble uploading this photo. Here it is, for good, finally. :-) I took this while I was taking a driver experience course at the Portola Railroad Museum, as this was the locomotive I drove, a Fairbanks-Morse H-12-44. It was weird in that it had no reverser, but rather the throttle had two seperate sets of notches, with the engineer shifting between them through a strike plate like on a Ferrari. The photo itself is interesting in that I only discovered the fake Lomo effect about a week or two ago. It wasn't a Lomograph, actually, but was taken with a Kodak Star 735 loaded with Kodacolor Gold 400 film processed in the conventional way.

This was the first look I ever got at a G.E. Genesis P32, in Albany-Rensselear on my way back from Washington, DC (after I had had my first-ever train ride at over 90 m.p.h.). Some people have said that this shot is blurry. That's because the camera was a point-and-shoot, and the scan wasn't top-notch either. Oh well... In those days, the P32s didn't work all the way to Buffalo and Niagara Falls as they do now, but were cut off at Albany-Rensselaer just as the old FL9s had been (and still were when I took this). We had an F40PH take us the rest of the way home, and that was my second-fastest-ever trip on a train as of then!!!

I took this on my first visit to Edinburgh in 1998, and initially it didn't make the cut for Flickr, but I now realise that it closely resembles many other peoples' work, including that which is well-regarded, so now I've finally included it.

Here's #8669 departing a few seconds after I shot the "...At Namesti Miru" shot.

Here DPP #8669, a CKD-built Tatra T6A5 tram, is awaiting departure at Namesti Miru. I like the completeness of this scene, in addition to the composition.

I took this because I saw perfect light, and couldn't pass it up. #8098 is a Tatra T3, very typical of the DPP fleet.

I saw this coming from a long way off, but didn't get the classic angle of it bearing down on me, although I regretted it somewhat later, as I never got the number. This Ceske Drahy Class 371 electric was pulling a MAV (Hungarian State Railways) Eurocity from somewhere in Germany to Budapest, via Prague, so it obviously wasn't going to stop in Roztoky, and I wanted to be sure that I got this pan shot. I set my camera up, passed up the offset head-on view, and swung my body around for the pan. It worked perfectly, and now I have this, which may be my best pan shot ever. I hope you like it.

I finally caught up to the Czech version of the Fiat Pendolino a week or two ago, and here's my first photo!! Amazingly, it came out reasonably well, in spite of the 100 ISO film (unusual for me) and the low light. I didn't expect it to, so I ran down the platform to the lead end, rested the camera on a bench, and took a second shot. It didn't come out. :-) I guess it's good that I took this one on faith, then. :-) Hopefully I'll have more of these in the foreseeable future, but not soon, as Pendolinos are rare in this country. Enjoy.