Weekly Training: Railroad Photography Throughout the Year (2015)

By Bob Campbell

Ever get tired of hearing about all those annoying resolutions about getting fit, working out, eating less, and being a better person? Do something about it - take up weekly training!

Grin from ear-to-ear as your cohorts drop like flies from exhaustion at the gym, falling off the resolves they set; while you continue your weekly trek to the trains, snapping happily away the minutes while exceeding your lofty goals of training each and every week of the year.

If you're not quite ready to take up the challenge, maybe this book will help motivate you. In over two hundred individual frames, I cover all fifty-two weeks of my year in full-color, railroad photography.

Covering the nooks and crannies around Vancouver, Washington up through the Columbia River Gorge, spending various weeks in Eastern Washington and the Connell area, including spots about Southwest Washington, even a somewhat less-than-fulfilling trip down through California, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, you can travel with me throughout the year in railway pictures.

"Long - Long - Short . Long -" with that wonderful rumble of an approaching train captured for your visual enjoyment on every page. Grab a copy, hold onto your butt, and let's get out to do some training together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bob Campbell
• Release date: Jan 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310961731

Bob Campbell

The short of it: over-educated, unemployed, and annoying with a camera. Quite possibly a dangerous combination.The long of it:I've been snapping pictures for over a quarter-of-a-century on equipment ranging from a Pentax k1000 to Canon SX700hs - but nothing fancier. In fact, after they retired my Kodachrome 64 film, I hung up the 'real cameras' and settled for "digital pocket snappers." It seems ninety percent of the challenge to taking pictures is to remember your camera (would seem obvious, wouldn't it? But look around at the folks with large, fancy cameras - no wonder they claim the phone-based lens will be the death of real photography). So I do my part and pack it almost everywhere.I was a latecomer to photography, though, so I had time to grow up in many different parts of the country with my formative stage in the South, but junior high and onward in the Pacific Northwest. The last set of initials after my name tacked on by the Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine - making the 'highest degree attained' line of the survey read Doctor of Veterinary Medicine.I still live in the state of Washington with my lovely wife of over two decades who continues to be an invaluable accomplice. For any hazard I manage to avoid, our son does his best to ensure we'll see an early grave.Having spent a little time teaching, I've grown to miss a captive audience to inflict my photography upon, so thank you Smashwords for providing me a forum for dispersing my imagery pain to be loosed upon the world.

Book preview

Introduction

Long - Long - Short . Long -

Welcome back! Well, at least if you've peeked at any of the other in my train series - otherwise, a simple Welcome!

These books are my tribute to the railways across the United States, particularly, our little corner of the world up here in the Pacific Northwest.

This specific entry into the registry of Long - Long - Short . Long - is a call to arms. Or maybe at least legs and camera. Wait, change that, I don't really want the image of me trying to work the camera with my toes burnt into your brain, sorry.

Actually, being of questionable mind and somewhat round body, I decided if those folks flocking to the gym and exercise venues with sparkling New Year's Resolutions could do it, so could I! I decided I, too, would go forth - training each and every week of the year. And this is my photographic proof I held out longer than a whole pile of those other resolute folks.

Oh, wait - you mean when they said they were going training, this isn't what the meant? Dang. They ran around in circles, stayed in one spot moving their limbs, and otherwise burnt calories looking like a herd of water-bottle-packing hamsters - seriously? No wonder they didn't make it to February.

Unfortunately for you, my fine, fearless reader, I did make it through to the end of the year. It made for a cool project, especially on weeks where I hadn't gone out to watch trains for one reason or another - yet knew I had to because otherwise, I'd have an empty week in this book out for public critique. That would be embarrassing. Turned out to be pretty good motivation.

Or maybe panic when you leave on vacation and realize you've traveled almost 1500 miles over several days and haven't found a single train - only empty tracks to show they've been by at least some time in the past.

Honestly, though, if you're a camera-packing, railroad junky - consider the challenge. After fifty-odd weeks, come back, visit my ramblings and let's see how we did together.

:Table of Contents:

- - - -

*Warning*

If by some chance these pictures stir a desire to record some of your own memories along the railways of America, please be safe about it. Respect the railroads' right of way and don't trespass. And by all means, don't become a statistic: trains can, and do, kill people. Modern welded rail and super-efficient motive power markedly reduce the ambient sound of rail traffic and have combined with a distracted population (think cell phones, texting, and our 'always connected' society with earbuds permanently embedded in the skull) to become a deadly mix - in addition to growing pressure to sound the warning horns less frequently.

Snap your shutter responsibly from a safe distance - zoom lenses are your friend.

:Table of Contents:

- - - -

Week ½ and 1: January 4 to 10

Ew. If you've got to be ugly, at least be the first name in the phonebook. This way, the lazy and inebriated will at least beat a path to your door. A weathered medium height gondola slides out of Vancouver on a mixed freight cut coming up and out of the lower yard shooting to the east along the wye near Vancouver Amtrak Station.

*An emergency apology about the quality of some images in this ebook: It would seem putting over 250 high resolution images in an ebook pushes the byte count well past 50Mb (oops). I did the reasonable 'reduce to 200 dpi' in an effort to meet the publisher's requirements for publication… and the pictures still looked acceptable. Unfortunately, that left me several megabytes over the limit. Dang. So I had to go through and either delete about 50 pictures, or select a random bucketful to be reduced to an icky 96dpi. I beg your forgiveness, but I opted for lower quality on roster shots. If I managed to butcher your favorite shots and you'd like the full resolution images, please contact me - I thoroughly enjoy chatting with fellow train enthusiast and will gladly send along the higher quality images. I appreciate your understanding.

Seriously? Fog and 37°F with strong, cold winds? For a week? Most of the western half of the city of Vancouver (possibly all of it for all I know, but I wasn't traveling too far in this mess) blanketed for days under cold, heavy fog - and unlike normal fog where the wind whips it away in no time, it hung around. After waiting for almost 45 minutes to see what those lights might've been stuck on the Columbia River train bridge, they finally came across. And for my ten frozen fingers and eleven frozen toes, what did I get? A pair of yard engines hauling a string of mixed freight out of Portland.

But not before we sent this single unit across the bridge - well, I presume it went across, although the dense fog swallowed everything nearly instantly.