HDR Photography
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.
So many almost-parallel lines in this image (both rail and power) gives it a disorienting quality.
Like a full-time Burning Man, Bombay Beach shifted from its origins as a sort of “California Riviera” in the 1950s to something with more the feel of an artists’ colony. The town’s little grid of streets amid the emptiness of the desert valley brings to mind open-world video game maps, but the eclectic nature of the beach itself makes reality (as usual) far more interesting.
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my home town of Clarendon Hills brought a surprise: the unremarkable train station from the mid-twentieth century has been replaced by a modern station and platform with a lot more greenery and some really interesting materials.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.)
When every other inch of Paris seems bathed in light, the rails exiting Gare Montparnasse make for an odd dark vein through the cityscape.
The bold train station geometry of the Musée d’Orsay couples with the high density of artistic masterpieces to produce some kind of dimensional portal.
Portland’s networks of light rail and vertical-lift bridges give the downtown a particular industrial style; I like to imagine that this is pretty close to what 1917’s “City of the Future” would look like if partially realized.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 