West of Hood River

One of my favorite places in Oregon is the Columbia River Gorge. Besides the beautiful scenery, it also features the Historic Columbia River Highway and the Union Pacific's mainline to the pacific northwest.

I'm taking this shot from the Mitchell Point overlook just west of Hood River. This was the location of the famous Mitchell Point Tunnel on the original Columbia River Highway from 1915. The tunnel featured views of the  river and gorge through windows carved into the rock. It was replaced by a water level highway in the early 1950s, and destroyed by the construction of Interstate 84 in 1966. There are currently proposals to recreate the tunnel as part of the restoration of the historic highway.

It is a wonderful place to stop, get off the highway and enjoy the scenic grandeur of the gorge.

The trains run at night

At least they can be made to look like they are. Turn some headlights on, provide selective illumination and  it looks like we've captured some mainline action.

Ithaca, New York, near where I used to live, was pretty much on the end of a branchline. It ended a few miles north of town. That branch was not the typical weed strewn, rarely used, two streaks of rust for rails. It carried some heavy traffic. There was a coal fired powerplant and an underground salt mine both served by rail  at the end. This meant long heavy trains of coal coming in, and long heavy trains of salt going out. Conrail would park the trains in the yard in town. This provided some good photo ops for me and my fellow train nuts.

One cold snowy January day we had a bonus, some borrowed Union Pacific locomotives showed up on the coal train. We would rarely see anything besides Conrail blue, so we were excited at this development. After work that day a group of us headed down to the yard, tripods and flashbulbs ready. A second train had come in that afternoon and was sitting on the adjacent track, another unusual development. We got lots of shots, different angles and scenes.

Something we did that night - maybe firing off all the bulbs - triggered the interest of the IPD, who sent a car to investigate. Some of us knew the officer, who knew that we weren't any trouble. After exchanging some pleasantrys he adminished us to be careful and took off, leaving us to our fun. Surprisingly for all the times we had been in railyards taking pictures, this was one of the few where were ever approached by the law. Things were different back then.

Just the local

Nothing special today, just the Weyerhouser local that runs from the Eugene Yard to Springfield. In past times it was one of the many local jobs out of Eugene that serviced the various industries between Fall Creek Junction and Noti. Those days are long gone, as are most of the mills served by rail. This train handles what local business is left. It generally isn't a long train, two locomotives and a couple of dozen cars.

Caught this one day at lunchtime, crossing High Street in downtown Eugene.

River crossing at Westfir

Here's yet another view of Amtrak 14. This video shows it crossing the Willamette River at Westfir, about 40 miles east of Eugene. This is kind of an experiment, testing the video capabilities of a different digital camera.

Seattle bound

One of the challenges in taking train pictures is keeping things interesting when dealing with the same limited subject matter. There are only a limited number of trains, and most of the time their appearance doesn't change. Hard to tell one day's trains from the next.

My approach is to look for different locations, angles, and perspectives. This shot is a good example. This train, Amtrak's Coast Starlight bound for Seattle, always stops in Eugene about lunchtime. If I go to the station I can count on the same scene, almost every day. That does get boring after awhile. So, I've moved down the tracks a few blocks, to catch the train leaving downtown. In the background is Grain Millers, whose towering concrete silos make for a good scenic prop. I've zoomed in really tight, shortening the perspective to make it appear that the train and silos are much closer than they really are. This perspective gives me another bonus, cutting out most of the trash and graffiti littering the trackside right of way.

#18 at Bartle tank

Even before I started taking train pictures, I've enjoyed hiking along the railroad. One time when I was only three or four years old, I set out from my folks house to walk along some nearby tracks, ending up miles from home. But, that's a story for another time and place.

Besides the physical act of hiking, all sorts of things are waiting to be found back where most people never go. Neat things like old structures. Not being visited by people generally means they are in good shape, not vandalized and covered with graffitti. With the right combination of perspective and imagination, I've been able to capture some real "back in time" images.

About 20 miles east of McCloud, California on the McCloud River Railroad sits Bartle tank. This antique wooden water tank dates from the very early days of the line, and was used to resupply water to steam locomotives. It is a bit of a hike in from the nearest road crossing, so not many people get to it.  I don't know if it was still in use by the date of this picture. The occasional steam powered tourist train that passed this way didn't need to rewater this soon after leaving town, nor did the line's diesel freights. I'm glad to have found it. It definitely added some visual interest to an otherwise unremarkable line.

I'd like to buy a vowel, please

No trains in this shot, just the path where they once traveled. This is near Likely, California, in the extreme northeast corner of the state. More cows and sagebrush than people and palm trees up here. This is the former Modoc Line, built by the Southern Pacific Railroad to provide a shortcut for Oregon lumber headed east. There was almost no online traffic, since the only population center of any size that it served was Alturas, which isn't exactly a major metropolis. As the lumber traffic diminished so did the need for the line, and in the early 2000s it was closed, and the tracks were beginning to be taken up.

Although the rails and ties have been pulled up and mostly removed, the block signs remained in place.These enabled the train crews and dispatcher to identify where a train was, and insure that it was the only train on that portion of the line at the time. I found it very curious that almost every sign had only the vowels missing. It didn't seem that they would be any less likely to stick to the sign than consonants, so my thinking is that they were gone on purpose. What purpose and by whom I could only guess - aliens? Vanna White?

I'll never know.