Railroads

Railroads have greatly interested me from my very early childhood memories and onward -- memories which go back to the last years of the steam era and the Third Avenue Elevated in Manhattan.  

I have been most of all fascinated by urban electric rail transit -- subways, trolleys, light rail -- and I have been on all of the systems, and the great preponderance of the route mileage, currently operating in the U.S. and Canada.  My transit interest started during my very young Brooklyn days.  We lived a block and a half away from the Church Avenue trolley, one of the three last surviving streetcar lines in that borough, and we fairly frequently used it.  Often it took us to the New York subway system, and to the wonders that its labyrinth of lines contained.  I was always fascinated by low growling roar from the old IRT cars accelerating, and the occasional sparks viewed from station platforms along the four-track stretch under Flatbush Ave. 

For the main lines and branch lines of the continent, over the decades I have enjoyed observing the patterns of tracks, often with switches, or crossing each other.  And I have always been intrigued by the variety and urgent visual impact of signals.  I have photographed railroad crossings in a great variety of settings coast to coast.  Locomotives, statically powerful or rolling through countryside or urban settings, have always provoked feelings of joy.  And rolling stock, freight cars of one kind or another set off in comely or other eye-catching landscapes, this too has frequently captured my attention.

Only a modest number of images are presented in these sections.  There is much more to add -- some day.