dmaze | Entries tagged with pictures

New York City of course has two major train stations these days. Pennsylvania Station handles all Amtrak service in and out of New York, plus New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad; Grand Central Terminal, historically the stomping grounds of the New York Central and New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroads, is the Manhattan end of Metro-North trains. Of these the Metro-North commuters by far get the better deal.

Grand Central has an outpost of the New York transit museum (more a gift shop with a small exhibit space) and I took some time there to look around. My first thought was that it could reasonably compete in the "Classy European Railway Stations" competition: several concourses filled with little shops, a small grocery, lots of granite and marble, pleasantly art-deco ticket windows, and so on. There's a downstairs level with lots of fast food options, and a restaurant on the main concourse. I did eventually find the transit museum outpost, which was worth the visit if not huge.

I then bopped over on the Ⓢ train to Times Square (very strong signs that there used to be a 4-track connection between the Times Square shuttle and the 7th Avenue IRT line) and took a ① to Penn Station. You might notice peering at my Flickr that there are no pictures of Penn Station. From the concourse this is basically three stations. The NJ Transit area is somewhat nice but has few amenities. The Amtrak station seemed to redecorate aiming for "sterile" and got "vaguely oppressive". The Long Island Railroad section is dark, and crowded, and generally not a place you really feel like hanging out. (And it's a good demonstration that just because you put shops and restaurants in a place it doesn't mean it's attractive.)

Because I could, I took LIRR out to Queens. The trains were quite comfortable, and felt oddly larger than typical MBTA stock. Seeing real position-light signals in action was a little strange, but (after some deciphering) there they were and they seemed to be showing reasonable things. It was a pretty fast, pretty smooth ride out, not a bad way to go if that's what your commute winds up being...just with that horrible station at the inbound end.

Danbury's other attraction is the Danbury Railway Museum, located in a former New York, New Haven, and Hartford yard at the end of a Metro-North commuter line. This was a worthwhile afternoon in my book (apologies to narya may be in order though). A little less than half of what they have is New Haven equipment, but much of it is in very good shape. Several Budd RDCs, which the staff claimed actually ran; a B&M 2-6-0 that clearly didn't.

One interesting thing was that a lot of their equipment was open. You could walk through a CN caboose, for instance. (Which seemed to very comfortably seat eight bilingual railroaders; were that many people ever necessary?) The one RDC that was open had a very nice interior, though not apparently its original one.

Definitely the most interesting thing there though was a retired Sperry Rail Service car. A lot of the interior was crew quarters, with bunk beds, a small kitchen, and a common room. All of the exciting electronics seemed to be at the back of the car but there wasn't a whole lot of indication of what you could get from a bunch of gauges and a rack of electronics.

So a nice train setup, but quite a hike; probably a little far to go just for the rail museum (we spent a couple of hours there including an excursion around the yard and had pretty much seen the whole thing) but worth seeing if you're in the area anyways.

(For the record, note that when I say "Danbury's other attraction" there are no coffee shops at all in the downtown area. There are two Starbucks with Danbury addresses if you happen to be in need of such a thing, but bring a GPS to try to find them.)

I spent most of a week visiting my parents in, erm, frigid San Diego. Where "frigid" means "it's between Christmas and New Year's, so the roses are blooming and people are surfing by the fishing pier".

One day trip was to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, a couple of hours east of my parents. It didn't quite fit my internal vision of "desert", mostly because I didn't expect there to be quite so many plants there. We took a couple of quick hikes five miles off a dirt road from the Great Southern Overland Stage Route of 1849. It was so cold. (Well, maybe it was a little breezy.)

One day I went to visit one of my coworkers, who had moved to San Diego. (Note to self: never tell parents that people in your group are moving from "all the way across the country" to "the city your parents are".) Fish tacos were had, work gossip was caught up on, surfers were watched, it was hoped that more of the city didn't collapse into the ocean. I also borrowed a digital SLR and played with it a bit; my general feel was that it was a bit more flexible and responsive than the camera I normally have, but it quite makes up for it in bulk.

We also headed for the San Diego Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park. I've been there once or twice before, but I don't think I was quite so engrossed before. The larger HO scale layout captured most of our attention; it turns out that their goal in life is to reproduce the SP/ATSF Tehachapi Pass route circa 1952 as close as possible. Compare, for example, the picture at left with satellite imagery of the same location. Working, correct, approach-lit signals somehow called to me as well. We wound up staying about 45 minutes after closing watching a train crawl up the 2.2% grade and talking to the people running it (who make me look like I have only a passing interest in trains).

I have this week off of work, and yesterday's little adventure was riding the newish commuter rail line through Hingham, Cohasset, and Scituate to Greenbush Station. In spite of being armed with camera and GPS, this was kind of anticlimactic. A couple of the stations seemed to be in the middle of nowhere (including Greenbush). There was pretty good ridership coming back for a mid-afternoon weekday train, though.

( Read more... )

Set off on my own before the afternoon wedding yesterday for a quick half-century, through Carlisle and Westford. Big accomplishment: my bike hit a thousand miles, all since April! Route map

My actual "destinations", such as they were, were the IBM building-to-be in Littleton and the current IBM buildings in Westford. They're suburban office park buildings. Enh. Aside from the I-495/MA-110 corridor, though, Westford is actually quite pretty, and the ride out on MA-225 is pretty worthwhile, even if the Rubel bike map only ranks it pink. Coming back inbound from IBM Westford looked pretty familiar...and then I realized that I was recycling the inboundmost half of the Ayer-Nashua-Boston trip without recognizing it on the bike map, go me.

I wasn't really motivated for a long ride this weekend, but I did want to get out of the house, so I rode out to Waltham to look at what remains of the Central Massachusetts Railroad (formerly the Massachusetts Central; subsequently briefly a branch of the Boston and Lowell, then the Boston and Maine). There is, in fact, an interlocking signal and a switch where the CMRR should branch off from the Fitchburg main line, but I don't think the track goes terribly far. There's quite a bit of evidence of it across Waltham if you know where to look; the most notable thing is the Waltham Highlands station at Hammond St. and Elson Rd.

From there I rode out just barely into Weston, around Cambridge Reservoir, and back through Lexington. Only one particularly notable hill (on Trapelo Road just west of 128). 28 miles. Not really gearing up for nuclearpolymer's century if I decide to do that, but hey, I got out on a nice reasonably cool August day. Route map

nuclearpolymer, narya, and I did a round-trip ride from Davis to ever-so-scenic Lawrence and Lowell on Saturday. This came in at 67.14 miles on my bike, thus accomplishing the "65-70 mile trip" goal. route map

Lawrence was, as expected, kind of a dump, though probably better than Fitchburg. Most of the vacant buildings were condemned, and at least a couple of new buildings were going up (one visibly new building, one contractor sign next to the big red X sign). Route 110 between Lawrence and Lowell was also 10 miles of dump; not actually many good scenic river views, broken beer bottles by the side of the road the whole way. Lowell turned out to be unexpectedly nice, with a fairly large downtown that looked at least somewhat populated.

Outside of the Merrimack corridor, the rest of the trip was pretty nice. The Lowell-to-Woburn route worked out pretty well; the Woburn-to-Lawrence route wasn't bad. We paid a surprise visit to remcat, since we were approximately there.

nuclearpolymer says she's addicted to the bike trip thing now. Quack.

We did in fact succeed in biking to just across the Maine state line yesterday. We started at Maudslay State Park in western Newburyport, then rode east across Salisbury, up MA-1A and NH-1A along the New Hampshire coast, and then crossed on US-1 into Maine. Coming back was the same route except that we detoured along NH-1B into New Castle. Bike computer said 59.26 miles at the end. Route map

It looks like there's a rail-trail project to connect Kittery to Portland. One amusing aspect of this is "ET bike" signs that appear once you show up in Kittery. Didn't explore much from there. (Web-surfing indicates that the "cabbage" cars on the Downeaster have bike racks that can hold eightish unpacked bikes, though, reservations required, $5-10 extra.)

As far as the route goes...it was totally flat, which was nice, but we faced a pretty harsh headwind coming back, which wasn't nice. Salisbury is a dump, Seabrook is slightly less of a dump with a nuclear power plant, Hampton Beach is overrun with people (and so as a bike you'll be the fastest thing on the road), North Hampton and north is pretty nice. Several steel-grid deck bridges, which people with smaller tires found troublesome. There was often a sea wall between you and the ocean. In all it was probably a nicer ride than most of the other coastal rides I've done, but I'm not sure I'd recommend doing it again.

Went all the way up the North Shore with

narya for, on my bike, just shy of 55 miles (far enough that the 1% difference in what our bikes report is noticeable). You can get from civilization to Lynn, roughly by following 60 through Malden and then not turning where it heads for the rotary-o-doom at 1, but it's not really that much fun. Then it was an exercise in following numbered roads over streets not paved particularly well; 129 to Marblehead, a path back to Salem, then 1A across the Huge Gratuitous Bridge! to Beverly to 127 to Rockport.

( Exercises in how to die on a bike )

Also, the sucktastic Massachusetts pavement was out in force. Just how craptactular was it, you ask? It was so suckalicious, that

narya lost the bag on the back of her bike in a pothole somewhere between Manchester and Gloucester.

( And then, in Rockport, we didn't actually bring any home )

Rockport itself was nice (I always trip on the REM reference though). We stopped, and got ice cream. There was a Very Special commuter rail ride home. We explored the wonders of Leverett Circle on a bike (conveniently not a circle now, but why isn't there a good way to get between Boston and Cambridge by bike?) and got home and showered. (route)

From the trip I took to the Bay Area last weekend. This largely seems to consist of wineries and pictures from 280, but then, I had two days there, and went wine tasting and then drove down to San Jose to visit people. (everything)

(I rearranged things in my bins tree a little. I don't think I broke any links I know of, but there's always that risk...)

I took some pictures on the, uh, walk to work about a month ago. Not too exciting, but...

As promised, I made my way out to the Amherst Rail Society's Big 2005 Railroad Hobby Show in Springfield. It was...big, taking up three buildings at the Big E. There were many, many booths of people selling model railroad paraphernalia. I decided I didn't need any of it (right now my shopping list is just small things, my wish list is the MEC GP40, and I want to build my own DCC system) and so saved myself potentially vast sums of money.

But the big highlight of the show was the layouts. It looks like there were 14 layouts, in N, HO, O, and G scales. They were all very modular (which actually kind of makes sense if you're dragging things to shows).

astra_nomer: there were a few booths that sold S-gauge things, I picked up a flyer from Port Lines Hobby Supply.

(All my pictures)

( Favorites out of the pictures, plus more commentary )

No longer having the on-campus photo dealing via LaVerde's and having too much pride to send my film through CVS or equivalent, I tried sending film off to York Photo Labs, on the basis of a comment in

davis_square. They seem to have done a reasonable job, and it was pretty cheap ($20 for processing on three rolls of film, plus a CD); I probably want to apply some GIMPage to the result, though, to make it more suitable for monitor display.

At any rate, for those who follow

chooblog, there are albums from before I made the table totally cluttered, the current state of the world, and the scenery demo track. There's also pictures from wandering around the Big Dig and North Station.

( Samples )

Current Music: R.E.M. - Time After Time (Annelise)

I finally fed a couple of rolls of film through LaVerde's and the SIPB scanner. So now there's some pictures of the T, Brookline and ET, and the benchwork for my model railroad.

( Some samples )

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dmaze

Page Summary

A tale of two train stations
Danbury Part 2: Trains
California quick review
Transit Geek: Greenbush
[bike] Blue, plus a milestone
[bike] Touring the Central Mass (Railroad)
[bike] The scenic Merrimack valley
[bike] The Mad Maine Trip
[Bike] (Don't Go Back To) Rockport
[Pictures] California
[Pictures] Bike Path
Lots of little trains
More pictures
Some pictures online

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