15-09-20 GUEST PHOTOS: Euro Sampler

In September 2015 I sent one of my operatives to Europe with instructions to take rail photos along his travels to London, Barcelona, Prague and Vienna. While I can't say I was necessarily impressed with the quantity of material that was returned (how do you miss seeing trams in Prague!) it was better than nothing. So anyway, let's dive right in. You can see the full set of pictures here.

We start with a train of Thameslink Class 337 Electrostar MU's waiting to depart the Blackfriars station in central London.

Here we see a National Express Class 357 MU commuter train passing alongside the Docklands Light Rail tracks in east London.

The DLR Canary Wharf station.

The commuter rail station at the Barcelona Airport only has a single track, but the airport is also served by the Metro.

The Aeri de Montserrat cable car is the most direct way for someone to reach the monestaries on that particular mountain. 

After the cable car, those not needing a cardio workout can use two funiculars to reach the attractions. The lower one, Funicular de la Santa Cova features a curved track.

Power house and info board for the Funicular de la Santa Cova.

Above that is the more conventional Funicular de Sant Joan.

If the cable car isn't your thing, there is also a winding rack railway that runs to the base of the funiculars.

15-05-23 VIDEOS: Caltrain Morning Express

For years I had been trying to get a good railfan video of a Northbound Caltrain Baby Bullet express. Usually I catch the 4:45 train departing San Jose as it consistently runs with gallery car equipment instead of the railfan un-friendly Bombardier coffin cars. However, on two previous occasions my video attempts were less than successful. Between 2006 and 2012 I was limited by my standard def camera. When I upgraded that I was thwarted by dirty front windows that made for generally poor videos.

This time I was catching a flight out of Oakland which provided me with an opportunity to catch a morning express run. However, as I mentioned before, I had no idea which of the trains would run with Gallery Car stock. For two mornings I staked out the San Jose Diridon Station, watching the morning rush and each time I encountered only Bomber trainsets. On the day of my departure I was down to the last run of the morning and I had to make a choice between catching a limited stop semi-express train or rolling the dice on the lst Baby Bullet. Failure would mean no railfan window (and a wasted trip) or an all-stops local. Still, Caltrain only has so many Baby Bullet trainsets so my luck had to improve.

Desperate for some degree of inside information I asked the conductor of the fimal semi-express train if the next Baby Bullet would have Gallery car or Bombardier equipment. He didn't know, but went ahead and made a call, informing me that the last train of the morning would indeed have Gallery Cars. So nearly 7 years after I first started trying to make a quality Caltrain RFW video I finally succeeded. Enjoy.



After transferring to BART I rode across the bay to the Coliseum station where instead of transferring to the AirBART bus, I would complete my journey on the $400 million AirBART...cable car? That's right, it looks like that someone in the capitol planning department used the April 1st version of the RPF because instead of building some sort of monorail or people mover to connect the rail transit station and the Oakland Airport, AirBART is a modern day cable car built by a European ski lift maker. Here is a video of the complex switch mechanism throwing over at the Coliseum terminal.



The AirBART cable cars work just like most other airport people movers, just instead of using electric motors, it uses a cable running between the rails. Cars automatically change cables at each end of the terminal and then again at the power house in the middle of the run. You can see how it works in this 8 minute video that captures a westbound run.



Well, that's it for my supplemental video post.

14-06-18 PHOTOS: Bay Area Capitol Corridor

Once again it is time for my annual cross country Amtrak trip. This year was a big different because instead of moving on to the final Transcon route, the Sunset Limited, I instead went back to re-ride the California Zephyr, this time with a father in tow as a combined Father's Day / Birthday present. The method of travel worked as before, flying out via Southwest, spending a day in San Francisco, staying over at my Cousin's house and then setting off the next day from Emeryville.

Despite covering the same ground as my 2012 trip I managed to fill most of the gaps in coverage my first survey of the line suffered from due to my need to eat and sleep. I also have a better handle on the tendency for Cannon cameras to have a disastrously cool automatic white balance and I was able to shoot most of this year's run with the "flash" setting that brought the warm tones back.

Anyway you can see the first set of photos right here!

We begin on San Francisco's Powell St hill where, due to the MASSIVE line of tourists waiting to board the cable car my dad and I felt we should just walk to the place I had identified for lunch. Here cable car #19 passes us on the steep upgrade, however we still would have been waiting in line.

Inbound #18 car at California Ave.

After lunch we managed to squeeze onto a cable car and continued onto the end of the Hyde Line where cars 18 and 3 were waiting their return to service.

Car #28 waiting down by the turntable. 

Alcatraz island as seen from the Municipal Pier.

East coast style sea gull.

It appears as if the Route 15 has been extended across the country somehow. Ex-SEPTA MUNI PCC #1055 in PTC colors.

PCC #1050 on the other hand is painted in the local colors of the SF Municipal Railway.

Seen here at the Embarcadaro with double ended PCC #1009.

Coming down the pike was Minneapolis-St. Paul painted PCC #1071.

Time was getting short so it was down to the Caltrain terminal where we caught a limited stops train to San Carlos. Here is a rear view from the railfan window showing the express portion of the run to San Bruno.


Gallery cab car #4006 departing San Carlos.

Cutting to the next morning here is the southbound Amtrak Train 14, the Coast Starlight, making a brief station stop at Emeryville with an odd mix of power including P40DC #809 and P32-8WH #505.

13-05-22 PHOTOS: California Sunset

San Francisco has a lot more to offer than just Caltrain and while I didn't have a lot of free time on this trip I did manage to get away for a trip down the F market to the Castro terminal, an early morning ride on the California Cable Car Line and finally a trip out the L Travel to the pacific Ocean to catch a California sunset.

You can find the complete set of photos here.

We begin at the Powell Line >Market St turntable, where MUNI has decided to install a dwarf signal to help the cable car operators know when the turntable track is spotted in the correct location. Here we see MUNI cable car #10 taking a spin on the turntable and showing the operation of the signal.


Here we see former NJT NCS PCC, now MUNI #1076 in a DC Transit paint scheme approaching the Powell St stop on the F market heritage streetcar line. Unlike the former SEPTA cars, the NJT PCC's still have openable rear windows with allowed me an unobstructed view out the back.

Eventually I realized that taking still out the back was sort of pointless so I switched to video for the ride between Gough St and Castro.


MUNI #1076 at Castro.

Wide view of the Castro station with potted plants. Castro St was renamed after the Cuban revolutionary by local counter-culture sympathizers in the early 1960's and I am sure that 50 years later he would be honored by everything the area now stands for.

The dark side to the new Urbanism...the trolley tracks connecting the F Market to the Twin Peaks tunnel have been paved over by a pop-up park!! Note all the wire diamonds where the single trolley wire crosses several lines of trolleybus wire. BTW a trolleybus line was also cut by the park.

Both the diamonds and frogs were able to support both pantograph and trolley pole operations. 

Old meets new. LED street lamp mounted on a trolley wire support pole.

12-02-28 VIDEOS: Caltrain and MUNI in HD!

You may remember back to my first set of Caltrain videos documenting the entire line between San Jose and the San Francisco King St terminal. I say set because I had to present it in the form of a Playlist due to the various limitations of video length on YouTube with breaks occurring at the station stops. Moreover due to the memory card capacity of my older camera I could only shoot about an hour of standard definition video which was insufficient and forced me to cut in some previous head end video I had taken.

Well today thanks to my ability my YouTube account having no length limit and my camera using 16GB SD cards I can now shoot over 80 minutes of 720p HD video on a single go and with all of the old fretting about card space out the window I could sit back and let the video run. So if you have the next 53 minutes free sit back and enjoy the ride on Caltrain's 4:25 departing 5-stop Baby Bullet run between San Jose and San Francisco.


If you are still up for more here are a pair of videos taken from the front running board of MUNI cable cars running on the Hyde Line. The first is from Powell Street to Hyde Street via Jackson and the second is from the Beach terminal all the way to Union Square in the opposite direction. Enjoy.

12-02-27 PHOTOS: Caltran Caltrain V

Ah yes, it is time again for yet another trip out to the Bay Area and what is shaping up to be the most competent and railfan friendly commuter rail system in the country. Frankly its pretty bullshit that I have to travel 3000 miles just to find a descent express run with a railfan window, but what's worse is that some people actually complain about the service and want to replace it with something far less enjoyable. Anyway this being the 5th set of photos to document the Caltrain system there's not a lot of new territory to cover so this time around I'll just stick to pictures of locomotives.

This set actually combines both the Caltrain portion of the trip and the San Francisco portion of the trip. However I was a bit busier on this trip than previous ones so I didn't have much opportunity to get out and ride the cable cars and F Market, but I've taken photos of those things before and they don't tend to change much.

You can find the entire set of photos here.

We begin once again at the Millbrae BART/Caltrain transfer station where despite my employer's contracted carrier on this route changing from United to Air Tran, my flight still arrived just in time for me to just miss a BART train which then causes me to just miss a Caltrain connection. I find it baffling when you have something with hour headways that the schedulers of the rapid transit system will allow their trains to miss said connection by 2 minutes.

Anyway, the scent of diesel exhaust still in the air I went down to the Caltrain platform where I discovered that the extended portion that covers the siding track was actually open that day (more likely had forgotten to have been closed). That gave me a much better vantage point where from I could get a photo of the next scheduled northbound Caltrain, which was still scheduled to use a Baby Bullet trainset with Cab Car #119 on point.

Caltrain MP36PH-3C #926 passing under the signal gantry at CP-BART.

#926 discharging and recharging at the station.

I was also able to get a good photo of one of the BART signal units which make use of the SafeTran Unilens signal fitted with a special goose-neck extension for close clearances and other odd fitting locations.

An hour after arrived my southbound train finally showed up with F40PH #914 in the lead.

11-08-12 PHOTOS: San Francisco Mornings

San Francisco basically consists of two thing...Caltrain and MUNI light rail and since last week our theme was Caltrain it's time we move onto the the MUNI section of this trip. This year I was a bit too busy to go out on an official MUNI field trip on one of their more far flung lines, however I was able to get some pretty good coverage of both the Cable Car system and the Heritage F Market Trolley line.

So for those of you who like such things this set of photos is going to be packed with them instead of the normal droves of railroad signals. So I urge you to all check out the entire collection of photos here because the selection below is not going to feature all pictures of such.

We start on Powell St showing cable car #21 heading southbound through a "pop out park" installed where street parking used to be. Ironically the company that made this destruction of car habitat possible was Audi.

Trio of cable cars including #14 at the Powell St terminal.

A packed Peter Witt Milan car #1859 attempts to add on more passenger on a bright sunny August day at the Ferry Terminal station.

Melbourne car #496 passing by the Ferry Terminal station.

California Ave cable car #58 hanging out at the Market Street terminal.

Cable car #6 approaching Union Square on Powell St.

Here I caught one of the single ended cars having trouble with it grip resulting it a replacement having to be installed outside the cable carhouse. The car had previously failed out on the road and had to be towed to the carhouse for a running repair. Still, sure beats an AC traction motor and a bank of IGBT's.

Despite the city's wet weather I encountered an original Austin Mini that hadn't turned into a large pile of rust. Of course it didn't look any way near as cool as another British import I came across.

A few of the cable cars had been given a new green paint job like #13 here shown crossing the California Ave diamonds.

10-04-03 PHOTOS: San Francisco 2010 - Part 2: Cable Cars

Yeah, you know I couldn't resist going back to San Fran and not having another jag on the cable cars. Those things are like railfan crack what with the eternal running boards and primo railfan views. Over my last two trips I had generally explored the system so this time I wanted to look at things a little more in depth. So I decided to spend a little time at the diamond crossing at California and Powell as well as to visit the cable car museum which, I discovered, does not charge admission so I didn't have to spend an afternoon there.

This part will have more pictures, not so much text, but I'm sure it will appeal to folks who like those kinds of things. Like last time you can view the entire set of San Francisco photos here, the Cable Car photos toward the photos.

We'll start off with a pair of videos showing MUNI #3 and #9 being turned at the Powell turntable. Yeah yeah its a tourist trap. Whatever.





Here we see #9 before it was turned in the tree lined terminal area.

#20 at Post Street with another car in sight at the top of the hill.

Which happened to be #21, shown here at the bottom of the great incline.

It's video time again as we climb the great incline to the summit at California Ave where we have the famous diamonds with the Cal Line.



The California Line is the one with the double ended cars like #60 here crossing eastbound.

The crossing is controlled by this cute little interlocking tower things which signals the northbound cars when they can begin their ascent because as they crest the top of the hill it is somewhat impractical for them to stop for crossing traffic. The crossing is a 4-way stop for road vehicles who must yield the right of way to crossing cable cars. The tower handles right of way for the cable cars with a small indicator panel.

Both directions of the Powell line stop on the north side of the street as #12 is seen doing here.