When Conrail was forcibly removed from the commuter rail business by Ronald Regan in 1983 the result in most places was a clean divestment of hundreds of track miles with no practical value to a freight railroads. However in a small handful of locations, main line freight operations continued to share track with full service commuter rail lines. ( Read more... )

Those of you who know me on Facebook are probably already aware of this, but mast March my father passed away from a long simmering condition. Over that month I was doing a good deal of driving to visit him in various hospitals and care centers. As a result I wound up with a number of random railfan photos that don't really come together into a ( Read more... )

About 2 years ago a friend of mine was able to take advantage of a rear vestibule ride on early morning Amtrak Regional Train 170 and provided me with a set of photos to process and upload. Well it took me a while, but I finally got them. The set covers the NEC from Philly to Boston and dates from March of 2013 so it's a bit of a step back in ( Read more... )

Well my web hosting is down for maintenance this week, but that doesn't matter because it's time for a Video episode and YouTube will be up and reliable even after the cockroaches have gone belly up. The subject of this video episode is the 14th Annual SEPTA Mid-Winter Trip, as seen in last week's still gallery.

In year's past I had always had ( Read more... )

Always feels a bit funny when I am posting the MWT photo set in the middle of summer, although I did manage to beat the six month mark ;-) Anyway, for those who remember this year's MWT returned to Doylestown for the first time since the very first MWT all the way back in the year 2000. The time commitment to get all the way out to the end of the ( Read more... )

It has been a long running tradition of mine to head out with Chuchubob for some NEC railfanning on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Typically there are some Amtrak extra trains running along with generally increased consists. Unfortunately this year an early winter storm created hazardous driving conditions so I hit upon the idea of taking ( Read more... )

An interesting side effect of the Silverliner II/III retirement of 2012 was that I basically lost interest in the SEPTA Rail Rodeo held each fall and open to railfans via a lottery system. I had managed to attend the Rodeo in 2010 and 2011, but not since. This year I was again cool on working to get a spot, but when a pair of tickets fell into my ( Read more... )

Over the last 10 years SEPTA has been systematically re-signaling its entire Reading side which up through 2005 was still using hardware that was effectivly unaltered from the days of the Reading. Today the project is almost finished with the last line still waiting to get upgraded being SEPTA's black sheep, the lowly old Norristown Line.

Once ( Read more... )

I always try to get out and do something for national Train Day, usually because its a great way to earn bonus Amtrak Guest Rewards points. More often than not I usually find myself having to scurry through the top level displays as I wait for my non-excursion Amtrak train to take me somewhere like Pittsburgh or Georgia. Well since I had nothing ( Read more... )

So the 13th Annual SEPTA Mid-Winter Trip was built around the opening of the new Pennsauken Transportation Center which would enable direct transfer between the RiverLINE and the NJT Atlantic CityLINE. One of the hallmarks of Philly transit is that most lines cross over and connect with other lines allowing for a large number of "circle" style ( Read more... )