Midweek Photos 3/28/2012

This is from my Connecticut Electric Railway Museum visit.

Dennis

Trollies are something I've just recently started liking.  Maybe it's a result of riding the SF cable cars and street cars a few years ago, I don't know.  Whatever it was, I get a kick out of them.  After a largely uninspiring winter, I've emerged into a very dry and windy spring.  I hate wind because here it not only blows my lights over, it can also blow my car off the road.   The wind finally died down some last Saturday night and I was able to get out and take a few photos.  I headed to a spot about an hour from me, but the temperature dropped way down and I forgot to bring my coat.  So, I went all the way back home to get one.  About a mile from my house I discovered a "dead" ethanol train. After getting a jacket, I returned and took a bunch of shots I always wanted to try on a stopped train.  Eventually a crew showed up and I told them I wasn't done with the train yet and I was there first.   I did get a nice portrait of the conductor standing on the nose of the engine holding his lantern.  Final shot is of BNSF MoW replacing rails.  I took a shot of the electro magnet used to pick up old spikes and tie plates.  There's the crane/magnet, a small gondola, and the foreman's little blue office on the rear.  At least, that's what one of the workers told me.

Kent in SD

Here are trolleys on the St. Charles line (oldest in the US) and new (red) Riverfront line in New Orleans. Both types of trolleys run on Canal Street and connect those two lines. Riding trolleys is a great way to see The Crescent City.

Inclined plane at Horse Shoe Curve. The cars were constructed at the Durango & Silverton shops.

I rode trolleys every day to grade school - eight cents one way anywhere.  We have lost something by junking rail and adding freeways.

We have also lost something by not having viable passenger rail service.  I am a retired Airbus Captain with lifetime travel benefits, but I would pay to ride on a decent passenger train that left at a decent hour and had reasonable connections.

One of the few remaining cars of the Hagerstown and Frederick Railway, on display and in only fair condition here in Myersville, Md.  It is privately owned by a very generous gentleman who allows the town to hold a trolley festival on his large property every October, where the trolley is parked.  He keeps it maintained in its present condition, but it needs full restoration.  It is sitting on tracks that were the original roadbed of the trolley line, which skirts his property.  My mom and dad used to ride these trolleys to Braddock Heights Amusement Park, at the top of Braddock Mountain in Frederick County, Md.

 All alone.

A passenger waiting shed and the rail bed on its way to Hagerstown.

Mike

Keeping with the trolley theme. Here are a few from the Orange Empire Railroad Museum.

This crane car would be an interesting scratch build

 The museums car barn

In keeping with the trolley theme, here are a couple of Chicago Surface Lines cars at the Illinois Railway Museum, http://www.irm.org/, which opens for the season this weekend.