23-11-04 PHOTOS: Grand Central Madison

In 2023 the opening of East Side Access, partly rebranded as the name of its new terminus Grand Central Madison, was all the rage. While the excitement would soon turn to disappointment as the LIRR completely botched the resulting service changes, the new GCM remained a must see, so myself and a friend arranged a day trip to NYC with plans to visit PORT interlocking and tower in Freeport, Long Island, traveling into GCM and getting some clean up photos at the M Cabin drawbridge in Long Island City. On the day of the trip I even achieved an unanticipated bonus goal of getting an extended amount of rear facing NEC photos from the back of my NJT train into Penn Station. You can see the full set of photos here ( mirror ).

First up we have an NJT NEC line train comprised of single level stock and a leading Comet V cab car, stopped at MENLO interlocking to wait for my train to pass by and platform at Metropark while a southbound Amtrak Regional train led by ACS-86 #637 pulls away on track #4..

Westbound signals at UNION interlocking with an NJT ALP-46 just visible at the Rahway platform on Track #B.

The DOCK drawbridges, tower and PATH ramps.

Amtrak MoW MP15D at Manhattan Transfer.

PORTAL bridge with the new bridge construction to the right.

NJT ALP-45 #4516 at ALLIED interlocking.

Video from the rear window of the entire North River tunnel from BERGEN interlocking to Penn Station.



Arriving New York Penn Station.

Heritage painted Amtrak P32AC-DM #713 waiting to depart with an Empire corridor train.

LIRR M7's #7692 and #7448 adjacent to Pennsylvania Tunnel and Terminal Railroad milepost zero.

LIRR Babylon Branch M7 #7565 passing the 2E position light mast signal at PORT interlocking. PORT was re-signaled around 2005, just before the LIRR stopped installing new position light type signals.

An inbound Babylon Branch train bracketed by M7's #7739 and #7188 arrives at Freeport.

13-05-03 PHOTOS: Planes, Trains and Ferrymobiles

I had so much fun riding the $2 Far Rockaway Ferry on my last visit that I just had to do it again, this time unencumbered by heavy bags and a travel deadline. On the second go around the weather was gorgeous and with no ancillary LIRR trip I could take full advantage of the temporarily "free" JFK Airtrain, which would save me the normal $10 fare or the hassle/indignity of having to take a Bus to the Federal Circle station.

After Lunch I traveled back to the Rockaways to catch the 4:30 ferry inbound to Manhattan, this time in wonderful sunny weather. I also discovered that the boat contained an outside upper deck from which I could drink my $3 16oz beer and take all the unobstructed photos I wanted. With A Train service set up resume later this week I urge any and all persons to take advantage of this amazing bargain before it goes away.

All of the photos can be found right here so make sure you go nuts after reading the whole post.

I am going to start things off at Chambers St where I caught the trifecta of an R32 departing, an R160 arriving on the adjacent WTC tracks and then an R46 A train arriving. I stopped filming at that point and missed another R46 A arriving from the opposite direction, but so it goes.


Flagging down an oddly clean R32 on the C I got some head end video between Chambers and Hoyt to fill a hole in my collection.


At Hoyt I took this photo of R32 #3929. It's amazing how someone in the NYCTA got it looking almost like it had just rolled out of a factory? Not many 50 year old pieces of rolling stock that could pull that off! A testament to the Budd company.

Video of the same train departing Hoyt St and crossing over to the local track in front of Hoyt tower.


R46 #5936 sits at Howard Beach ready to take the Diverging Approach Restricting signal into the turnback pocket track there.

R46 #5838 returns to the inbound platform past construction workers there to repair the signaling and track damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

A flexible A train shuttle bus sitting outside the Howard Beach Air Train station.

Here is the inside of the Howard Beach station. Because the JFK "AirTran" Air Train is little more than a glorified elevator there wasn't really much to photograph in terms of signaling or infrastructure, so I mostly got video of the entire route and a few other select photos. 

Here is a route video of the AirTran AirTrain as it runs from Howard Beach through Federal Circle and then Anti-Clockwise around the terminal complex back to Federal Circle. The PA was doing a lot of trackwork so the AirTrain was running on a 20 minute headway with several en-route delays. Wonderful for a system that is trying to get people to their flights in a timely manner. This did mean several good shots of wrong railing. Due to a bit of a miscue the first part of the route from Howard Beach to the next station is the last part of the video and is taken in the outbound direction.

BTW Pigs and I were bothered multiple times about taking photos by PA security and attendants, but it was a pretty soft bother due to the whole tourist zone thing and we didn't protest. The good news was the reliance on ZPTO was that nobody was ever around to stop us from taking photos and video on board the trains so every time we were bothered we simply clicked ignore.

Oh, after a while Pigs got tried of being quiet and we began to engage in a running commentary partly about the airport, but mostly about Seinfeld and TV Tropes.


AirTrain car #209 departing the Federal Circle station for the JFK Terminal complex. For those of you who don't know the AirTrain us a fully automated system that uses Bombardier's Advanced Rapid Transit concept. One of the hallmarks is the use of linear induction motor technology that requires an aluminum slab to be run down the center of the track to eliminate the "need" for old fashioned rotational motors. Yeah, this is much simpler.

Well the title promises planes so here you all go. Here we see an Asiana Boeing 777 #HL7791 about to land on Runway 13L.

11-11-19 PHOTOS: High Line Extended

Three years ago I headed up to NYC to check out its brand new High Line linear park (not to be confused with the "real" High Line that is still carrying freight trains in West Philadelphia). Well last year I had tickets for War Horse on the Sunday before Thanksgiving and it seemed like a perfect time to take a side trip to explore Phase II of the High Line which runs up to the blip out around the West Side Yards.

In addition to the High Line I managed to snag some great photos out the front of a NJT Arrow III train on the NEC, which prompted the conductor to demand I delete the photos or he'd call the police. Long story short I have the photos and the police never showed up. if you would like to see said photos, "illegal" and otherwise, click the link here.

We begin the day at the Hamilton NJT station with Amtrak HHP-8 #663 hauling northbound with a Silver Service train.



If you didn't see it the first time I posted the video there was also a bit of ticket drama where a family in a hurry forgot to let all of their $20 a pop NJT tickets print out prompting this kind soul to run after then...and then run after them again (too late that time) to give them the tickets. BTW I was skipping a headway due to an early arrival at the station and not wanting a local. In the photo you can see the family rushing past ALP-46 #4649, and then the consequences in the video.

During the wait a southbound train with #4603 pulled into the opposite platform.

Not sure why NJT is using the Push-Pulls on the local trains and the Arrow III's on the express trains, but whatever. Here A-III #1424 pulls into the Hamilton Station.

So what happened on the Arrow III is that the crew forgot to close the door to the vestibule cab allowing me to take some really nice photos of the NEC signals as well as the occasional Acela Express trainset.

Approaching Princeton we see the relocated 472 automatic signals which allows trains stopping at the station to clear the block behind them, which had been a bottleneck before. Yes, the top PL LED lamp has failed.

NASSAU tower just north of the Princeton Station.

Amtrak AEM-7 #934 with a southbound regional.

MIDWAY interlocking and its pneumatic point machines.

Alright, at that point the disk conductor decided to intervene so we now get to skip ahead to the High Line. Here we see some cargo containers on the un-rehabilitated section north of 30th St that the Parks Department are trying to protect from German submarine attack.

The High Line was pretty crowded that day. Here we are looking north at 28th St.

08-06-20 PHOTOS: Video Path (and Other Touristy Stuff)

This set of photos is a bit hard to classify as I went to an O's game and took photos of MARC and later went to NYC and took pictures of DOCK intelrocking and other touristy things as part of a visit to the Museum of Natural History and the photos ended up on the same roll together.

Not much more to say than that except I now have two backlogs, one of the photos I need to process and another of the processed photos I need to write up. You can blame the free UK Railway signaling simulator SimSig for taking up a lot of my time recently d.d b.b

As usual you can find the photos here:

http://acm.jhu.edu/~sthurmovik/Railpics/08-06-20_VIDEO_PATH/-Thumbnails.html

And now on with the show.

Let's start things off with run of the mill CSX GE C44-10W #5244 rounding the curve at Bailey's Wye. That B&O CPL signal it is passing is a brand new in kind replacement for one that was demolished in a derailment a few months earlier.

Same train moving past the southbound CPL to HB TOWER interlocking next to the Hamburg St light rail station with C40-10W #5451. 

Here's a view of the MARC tracks and people arriving for the game.

MARC's GP39H-2s #72 was in Camden station preparing to depart south for the evening.



And I was indeed able to catch its departure led by single level cab car #7757.

The O's had paid to wrap half of a MTA-M light rail car. I guess wrapping the whole thing was out of reach for a sub-500 team :-D

On my way up to NYC I got some good photos of DOCK intelrocking in Newark. These photos were well timed because many of the all amber PL's have since been replaced and colourized.

For example this gantry with the 148R, 150R, 150L and 152R signals was still all amber, but has now been colorized.

The 141E and 143W points with pneumatic A-5 machines.

 The compact type 126R signal.

The compact type 122R and 124R signals, 122R has bee replaced by a full size colourized unit.

Speaking of new signals I got photos of the new 472 signal at Princeton, relocated so that stopping trains weren't in the signal block allowing following trains to maintain speed. Looks like Amtrak has finally stopped using full round lower heads when there is only a single row.

In addition to the natural history museum that had way too much stuff from the 70's in it, I took a side trip to RESTAURANT!

And when are they going to finish St John the Divine?

The main reason for my trip was to get some RFW videos from the front of a PATH train in the tunnels. I was mostly successful with a few that turned out too blurry, but I was able to capture Grove to Newport and then 9th to 33rd. 
 

 
Lastly I got a shot of the westbound Hudson tube from Christopher to Newport, and we had a competent engineer so it times at over a minute faster of my later video with the Christmas tree, however i didn't set things right and the video is terribly dark, worse with the low res. Sorry.



Anyway, hope you enjoyed them. You'll see more in the near future I swear.