:previous: Great shot, those padlocks look like some kind of art installation!

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Dredging the archives again - San Francisco CalTrain station, evening commute, day after Thanksgiving 1978:

Virginia & Truckee No. 21 J.W. Bowker built 1875 in Philadelphia by Baldwin, on display at California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento

A few night shots of Paddington:

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Paris, Gare de Lyon
 

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TGV arriving from Lyon
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Suburban train arriving from Montargis
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TGV depot on Gare de Lyon track
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Amazing, legendary station. I'm always impressed at how bright and open Europe's train sheds are; typically our major ones are underground, dark, gloomy, and grimy, and our smaller ones sometimes don't even have any shelter for passengers.

This is one of the shortest railroads in the US, the Dardanelle Russellville Railroad in Arkansas which is just a couple miles long. Its right down the road from me and I go down there all the time and watch the trains run. Heres the D&R 19 from a few days ago, which is being repaired right now. It was built in 1949 I believe.

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Two FrontRunner commuter trains at the Inter-model Hub in Salt Lake City

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The old Rio Grande Depot across the street

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Great photo. That's a characteristic shop for a lot of those operations, just enough shelter from the weather to get the job done (when it has to be done indoors). Short lines survive generally by being more customer service oriented than the Class 1 railroads, and they operate on a shoestring. Everybody does more than one job; the President/CEO may spend time at the throttle and the general manager/trainmaster might double as a signal repairman and even do track work. While everyone works harder, the policies are more relaxed on short lines and the people tend to be friendlier. Make yourself a familiar presence and get to know some of them, and you might get invited for a cab ride. That's a neat experience.

^
When I was there taking that photo, on another one of their trains they were taking a class of 5th graders or something for a ride down the line. That line today only takes goods from the Dow Plant and then a tire recycler up to a switch where it meets the main railroad line, which is 1.7 something miles away. They only run the trains about once a day, but the D and R company recently bought another small line down in southern Arkansas, so they are trying to expand their business.

On another note, these trains actually offered commuter services to Russellville down to the community of Dardanelle on the river. At one point there were little stops, like bus stations, along the line. They stopped that service I believe in the early 60s. The train stops dont exist anymore, which is a shame.




Wow, I cant believe they were still using those old 1910 or whatever passenger cars back then. Thats incredible.

While some steel cars of similar design type were built as early as 1909, I think the ones still in use on the SP commuter trains were from a bunch bought in 1927. I read someplace that they remained in service until 1985. The bi-level gallery cars were pretty new when I took the photo, I think.

Amtrak was shedding the GE P30CH locomotives, which proved unreliable, excessively heavy, and poor-tracking and were hated by the crews. A few of them hung on for a while on some of the heaviest trains; they ran on the Auto Train, and I saw a set on the Sunset Limited in El Paso around 1986 or 1987. I saw a fire-gutted one on the dead line at Amtrak's Beech Grove shops (Indianapolis) around 1991.

I went on one of these today up to Bendigo... lots of fun fangen through virgin bushland @ 160kph!

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Wow, wish we had those in the shitty US of A.

Do incline railways count? :)

Aaron (Glowrock)

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Awesome photos, Robert! :yes: I've definitely gotta go check out Johnstown in the near future. I've read about the horrible flood there back in the day (1930's, I want to say?), talk about a horrible loss of life! :(

Again, great photos!

Aaron (Glowrock)

Thanks, Aaron. Johnstown has had many floods because of its location at the confluence of valleys that funnel heavy rains into flash flooding. The legendary flood occurred in 1889 when a dam on a large private lake upstream failed and sent a huge wall of water roaring down on the town. The downtown mostly was obliterated, and many lives were lost. My grandmother told of being sent alone to Johnstown as a 14-year-old girl on the train to help an aunt reestablish her household after the flood. I suggest reading David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood before you go, so that you'll get a fuller comprehension of what happened suddenly on a Spring day.