Hello, everyone. and welcome to another edition of the Midweek Photos. A chance to take a break from your normal day and look at photos of trains running in the real world. I'll get things started with a few photos from my week at RailCamp 2019. I normally play photos of the week chronologically, but let's begin at the Strasburg Rail Road. This was Thursday, July 4.
This cobblestone welcome sign is a nice touch to begin you visit to the Strasburg.
The first person I see working is none other than Alex Merrill, who was just learning how to make the small scale steamer operate when I first met him during RailCamp 2015.
Alex gives everyone a big sweaty hug on this hot humid morning. Poor Ellen gets to go first.
Former Great Western Sugar no. 90 a 2-10-0, is the steam engine that gets to run today. We see her pulling to the coal pile.
First assignment for one group of campers is to run a train on a stretch of track the train is the Lancaster Oxford & Southern diesel powered car.
Chris teaches Rail Camper Zachary what the various handles are for in getting this unit to run.
Another group gets to learn how to be a brakeman on the railroad. learning about brake wheels, coupling and hand signals to talk to the engineer.
One of the routine excursions passes by, led by 90.
Crew members share a little information as former Canadian National 2-6-0 no. 89 gets cleaned up. She will be our steam locomotive for Friday's operations.
A little while later, no. 89 is fired up, and putting off a little cloud of smoke.
The rain in mid afternoon disturbed some of the planned activities, but that was made up for with a short walk through the locomotive and restoration shops. No. 89 was inside at this point of the storm.
With the rain stopped, and the day nearly ended, some of the staff, Erik Armpriester, Ryan and Alex Merrill talk shop with the RailCampers. Joshua (in blue rain jacket) holds the floor at this point.
I will post more of my RailCamp experiences, but it is late, and I need to get to bed.
Have a good week everyone. Please post some of your railroad photos here.
OK, I'm going. Gotta see that for sure. I have a radius of about a 4 hour drive that I consider a day trip, so that put western Iowa and eastern Nebraska well within my range. I figured there would be less clutter and people on the Nebraska side, so decided on that. It's been awhile since I've been along the tracks from Fremont to Grand Island, Nebraska so a scouting trip was in order. I did that last Saturday and quickly remembered why I don't go down there very often. The land is very, very flat, few curves, few bridges, not much of anything photogenic unless you're crazy for corn fields. U.S. 30 closely hugs the tracks making it harder to back away for a shot. I finally came up with three possibilities, which like a good fishing hole I'm keeping quiet about.
One of them was anchoring my kayak in a river and taking a shot as it crossed the bridge, but I'm thinking that is now out because of the 8 inches of rain that fell the past few days. It would be OK to kayak on it, but once you drop anchor there will be thousands of tons of 5 mph water slamming into the back of the boat which is not a good thing.
Done that once before. It did not go well.
