After a nighttime poster session, crowds of chemists issued forth from the San Diego Convention Center and across the tracks to the Gaslamp Quarter.
Tag: tracks
BNSF Paint Job?
A childhood spent with a bedroom window facing the train tracks built a skill for identifying train engine paint jobs, but the intervening years of mergers and the geographical distance between Illinois and California have diminished the intense recognition that would have had me swear that black, orange, and yellow meant a BNSF engine.
Visiting the Swing Set
One of my best images (and I do mean best) captures a swing set adrift in the Salton Sea, seemingly separated from time and space. While my first worry was that an aerial view of the swing and its setting might remove some of the magic, I’ve realized that the opposite is true. The merging of sea and sky into a single cloud-graced expanse make even the mundane array of vehicles on the shore look parked at the edge of forever.
A E S T H E T I C Rail
I’ve played with that 90’s vaporwave aesthetic in the past with aggressive color grading; on this particular San Diego dawn, those steps were hardly necessary. Palm trees and magenta hues do most of the hard work for themselves. I can hear the synths already…
New Train Station in Clarendon Hills
A visit to my home town of Clarendon Hills brought a surprise: the unremarkable train station from the mid-twentieth century has been replaced by a modern station and platform with a lot more greenery and some really interesting materials.
The station itself uses both lacquered rails (on the left) and wooden slats at odd intervals (Fibonacci-esque, but I didn’t measure to be sure.)
Winter Streets I & II
Winter in the North Country grips the homes and streets of Canton, New York.
Flying Railroad
The ancient lake bed that became the Bonneville Salt Flats refloods with water each winter—but just a few inches. As a result, raising these tracks even slightly above the bed is all that’s needed to protect them.
On the Tracks
Stick season has arrived, with orange everywhere. Holes in the trees have appeared and the optical topology has some new path options. Even the steel tracks now appear some copper other-metal.
Walk by the Tracks
Altweibersommer has struck the North Country, with warm afternoons reaching shirtsleeves weather and the Sun bakes the linear forms of railroad tracks and dry branches. A local man walks his dog by the modern metal forms of feed silos.
Hoot Owl After October Snow
Hoot Owl Express
Bleary-eyed, through a wide-open aperture with the last hints of sun and the now-dominant neon signage as its only lighting, I present to you: the Hoot Owl Express. This is (for the moment) St. Lawrence’s main “student bar,” its walls covered in old hockey jerseys and its staff preternaturally capable of spotting a fake I.D.
Train and Storm
Chicago’s suburbs are filled with older train stations like this one. In an area where quaint, older homes are often knocked down to make way for McMansions, these stations are sometimes an area’s only link with the past. (Luckily, Hinsdale is better than most areas in this respect.) On a particularly dramatic and thunderstorm-ready afternoon, this particular train platform feels like it could be unstuck in time.
Guest Post: Leigh Valley Logging
Today’s post comes courtesy of Colin Hill.
While driving around Berkshire county testing out my new camera (which is in fact my brother’s old camera), I took a wrong turn and wound up on a small road sporting a recycling center and this small logging operation. In the background of this shot you can see train tracks which run parallel to the road and the edges of the October Mountain State Forest towering in the distance. In the foreground you can see lots of snow and logs stacked up like firewood for a giant’s furnace.
Decaseconds 