NYC/Northeast and cross country Amtrak trip...

More shots:

Sounds like a great trip !!

I shot some video, too...

I got this at about 120 MPH along the NE corridor, at the bridge at Perryville/Havre De grace, Maryland (it’s a place I used to photo trains at when I was in the area for the Army): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0BopdFE6cg

And when’s the last time you saw a SW trying to race a steam passenger run out of a yard? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFr8V0aeJaA

Cross country by rail is something I'd like to do myself. Sounds like a great trip.

Mike

Sounds like you had a great trip. I take an across the country trip at least once a year. 2016 I am doing at least two trips. One east west east and another north south north.

Clem

Nice Video of the Susquehanna River between Perryville and Havre de Grace Maryland.  We used to jump off that bridge when we were much younger.

I made a point to tell everyone with me to not bug me when we crossed that bridge as I'd always wanted to get video going across it. I was at Aberdeen Proving Ground twice in the Army and I often went to Havre De Grace to troll the antiques places and watch the trains zip up and down the NE corridor. Sometimes I'd cross the river to Perryville to following the line up through Port Deposit (what a neat little town) and to hit the outlet malls on that side of the river. I didn't go there nearly often enough as you had to pay a toll there...

The sad thing is we didn't encounter a single hobby shop the entire time...

Except one. We took the subway out to Train World. I expected a large retail store. Man, what a crushing disappointment that was. They have a huge mail order business but the retail store was grossly underwhelming.

Sounds like you had a most interesting trip! Thanks for the photos!

24MP Canon, wow the cameras get better all the time. My first two digital cameras were Canon, really convenient to use the menus. I'm nearly due for another upgrade.

I circumnavigated the country on Amtrak in 1998 when they had a bargain special deal (coach). 8900 miles with pretty good on-time performance; only the last train (Coast Starlight coming home to Oregon) was really late. Three stops to visit friends and relatives in Seattle, Rochester NY and Boynton Beach Florida.

The Jacksonville to LA transcon run was still on then. That was a long haul by coach. The sleeping car attendant yelled at me for using the shower - couldn't find him when I wanted to ask permission (booking agent had suggested it was possible). I remember an old dial telephone at the station in Alpine TX. "Virginia City" private car (former owned by Luscious Beebe) was on the end of the train from LA. Sat next to a gal who told me all her marital blues; we finished off our pooled collections of little airline bottles of booze. New snowfall coming around Mt Shasta. In the dome lounge, a black woman from Louisiana was flabbergasted to see real snow for the first time.

Lots of travel adventures by train that don't seem to happen as much in air travel.

There wasn't any way to know that ahead of time. Besides, we didn't have access to a car on the one day we went, so it's really a moot point.

We did have a car on a 2-day venture into the wilds of Pennsylvania, but it came down to either of the two:

• Going to Strasburg, Hershey and Steamtown in Scranton

-or-

• Searching the countryside for hobby shops

We chose the former and I'm sure it was the better decision.

Pixels are great but you still have to be a good photographer. Yes, you did the right thing going to the places you did.

I recall a post back in August where people tried to offer you advice and you posted this.  Neither of us model in 3-rail at all, so I don't need to know places that most sell three-rail stuff.

Yep, tracking down stores that focus on 3-rail stuff would have been a massive waste of our time.

I'm not sure where you're going with that. Anyone posting here they didn't need to know of stores that sell mostly, say, N scale stuff wouldn't have raised an eyebrow here. I'm not sure what offense I made to the forum Gods by saying I didn't need to know of stores that focused on stuff I didn't need.

Train World sells just as much non-3-rail as anything else, just look at their ads. I had no idea that their retail store would have had very little of hardly anything. It wasn't that the focus was on 3-rail. Really, they had very little of anything, no matter what scale you were into. My friend was a dedicated HO guy and he was equally disappointed in the retail store. They actually had a lot of G scale stuff, far more than HO scale (obviously, the most popular of scales). That really shocked me.

Oh well, got a nice subway ride out of it which left Grand Central station and gave us the excuse to go there and spend an afternoon in the most famous railroad station in the country...