I attended a work conference in Texas last spring and since I was already halfway across the country I decided that I’d might as well just keep heading west and spend some time visiting family and traipsing about the Pacific Northwest.
On August 24, 2014 I was able to spend a few hours trackside around Bear Mountain State Park along the Hudson River in New York State.  I’d wanted to check out this area for awhile and it ended up being a decent day. We didn’t hike up the mountain though as we weren’t entirely sure where we could get a good vantage point. Unfortunately, what you see here are pretty much all the photo’s I got as the CF card in my camera got corrupted somehow. Oh well, maybe that experience will give me the kick I need to get a new(er) Nikon. Continue reading “A mid-Autumn trip to Bear Mountain State Park”
As part of the Northeast/New England RPM Meet in Collinsville, CT there are a number of tours available to participants. This year I went to Palmer, MA for the Mass Central Railroad’s open house. Lighting was a little tough since we was there at high noon on a gorgeous June 1st, but I did my best to get a few shots of the equipment and facility Continue reading “Mass Central Open House”
On July 11 I flew to Colorado to spend a few days visiting a friend who lives in Denver. While not strictly a railfan trip, I did manage to spend a day scouting out the eastern side of the Moffat Route. To my surprise I even managed to shoot a few trains.
Tired of being inside while the weather was so beautiful, and a little bummed about not having had much time to be trackside over the summer, a friend and I took a day back in September and drove to the Connecticut shore. We made a stop in Essex to take a look at the steam operation (not really my thing, but the ancient GE diesels on the property were neat) then spent quite a bit of time around Old Saybrook and Old Lyme before working our way back north through Berlin and Windsor Locks.
I spent some time over the last couple of weeks browsing through my trackside photos from 2010. Though I didn’t get out nearly as much as I had in previous years, I did manage to get some decent shots. I think I’ll probably make a tradition out of this post as it’s a nice way to put the previous year into perspective and provides a good deal of inspiration to get back outside and shoot some more. Continue reading “2010 Railfanning Retrospective”
With nothing planned for the weekend, and no desire to hang out with the usual suspects all day (CSX, PAR & NECR) I decided it might be nice to go for a bit of a drive (or a lot of a drive depending on how much driving you consider 460 miles in one day to be) to watch the Conway Scenic Railroad move a rare high and wide load along their line in the shadow of Mt. Washington. So, on Saturday (June 20th as I’ve been a bit neglectful of updates to this site) Tom Murray and I loaded the truck up with scanner, antenna, cameras, lots and lots of batteries, cold drinks, and not a single map of the area we were traversing before grabbing a rather unsatisfying breakfast at Dunkin’ Donuts and charging northwards into the White Mountains. Continue reading “High and Wide!”
The southbound Vermonter crawls into Palmer behind GE P42 #122 on Presidents Day 2009.
For the second year in a row, Tom and I spent Presidents Day at Palmer. Once again the action didn’t dissapoint, plus the weather was considerably better than the year before. While the morning was pretty dead, and we ended up spending most of the time hunting for lunch, the afternoon was much much more fruitful with numerous appearances by Amtrak and CSX, a couple of NECR trains and at the last possible second Mass Central or Finger Lakes or whatever it is that they are. Continue reading “Presidents Day at Palmer 2009”
While prepping a project for painting this afternoon, the scanner picked up a an empty P&W coal train heading north to E. Deerfield from Mt. Tom. The dispatcher had the crew copy out a Form D instructing them to wait at S. Deerfield for ED2-X which was shuffling some hoppers out of an industrial siding. Seeing as how the rain had stopped, I hopped in the truck and headed up to Deerfield to try and get in on some of the action. Continue reading “Mt. Tom Coal”
I took advantage of Helene being out of town, to get some time trackside today. It was generally sunny, but quite cold and windy. I met up with Tom at Palmer where I was just in time to catch an empty string of autoracks headed west. NECR did a little switching, and then an eastbound general merchandise train came through. It didn’t look like the rest of the day was going to be very eventful, so we headed north to E. Deerfield. Continue reading “Only a bit of snow left…”
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