Posted on 08/27/2017 6:16:46 PM PDT by mairdie
Over 15 hours of railroad travel compressed down to 7 minutes. Footage from various trips, on various trains, going in various directions. Clearly, I don't fly.
Tropicana Orange Juice Train: 1221 miles in Less Than 3 Minutes
Great video! Thanks for the link. They have much the superior camera and camera person. Also, their camera is stabilized to the front of the train.
What I wouldn’t have given for a steadicam junior. Well, actually not. I don’t like the front weight. Some sort of gimbal tripod between the seats would have been lovely.
Every company I’ve been with has been okay with it. The sort of thing you get settled upfront. I can’t remember a company ever saying no. The really hard thing for them was that they had to donate 20 percent of my time to professional groups, and I worked 50 percent of my time at home in another state. Commuted 180 miles each way once per week.
Yes, definitely the Zephyr. Good catch!
When you traveled as much as I did, it used to be nerve-wracking when the train stopped in the middle of nowhere, as that footage showed. I remember our porter hiding once. Sometimes accidents. Sometimes people giving the engineers nightmares.
Thank you. Excellent footage. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, Falcon. You’re very kind and it’s much appreciated.
I liked the scene shot from the rear of the train with a sharp curve where you could see most of the train enter a tunnel. It appears you generally travelled in a compartment but you roamed the train to shoot your videos, especially from the rear and out the back door. Did you ever encounter much problem from the crew?
Sheldon’s Model Trains
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCTzWZulcwg
My family was railroad, so I was raised standing on back closed platforms and looking back along the tracks while Daddy pointed out the signals he had invented. So I just took for granted that I’d stand where I could see well and chat with the crew. I suppose if you ask permission, it’s more likely you’ll get no for an answer. Assumptions work good, along with friendly. And the camera didn’t hurt. I have a lot of shots of crew working on the train but the shots didn’t fit into the narrative I was building. As you can see from the dirt on the window, I’m never outside. Only time the windows are open is when I’m shooting a crew member leaning out an open window with his walkie-talkie. Had one to go with the people outside the train, but didn’t have enough time to fit it in. There’s a LOT of downtime for the crew, and I suppose they wouldn’t have those particular jobs if they didn’t enjoy chatting.
I always traveled in a compartment. It’s a base for a long trip. Think 2 1/2 days coast to coast in a box. Depending on which side of Chicago you’re traveling, you have other cars to visit. Double decker observation cars can’t go through some tunnels, so none NY-Chi. But there will be a dining car or a snack car. Most cars are assigned seating and you just walk thru them to get to the public cars. So people are on their feet all the time wandering car to car.
There’s an assumption in the public cars that you’re all part of the same adventure. No one sits at a table by themselves. The person who seats you fills your table and it’s assumed you’ll chat. I still have horrors remembering husband asking an elderly woman across the table if she was going to finish something on her plate. There’s friendly and there’s TOO friendly.
Let me add that all of these observations are from 25 years ago. The day I retired from IBM is the day I stopped traveling.
I watched it. Not my kind of show. For humor, I’m more into Due South. Only thing I enjoyed was the clear distinction between O gauge, HO and N. I noticed that they didn’t show an O. That was a shame because it would have made the O/HO distinction clearer. Have been in model train stores that had the most AMAZING O locomotives in brass. Which I understand that people actually paint. ??? Favorite model railroad is the one at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. IMMENSE!
I did put up on YouTube the footage of an interview I did with a stranger I saw playing with a huge model train in his backyard. Glad I have it now since the tracks are gone, the house sold, and I couldn’t find anything on the internet about him. I have one relative and one friend who actually renovated real locomotives. I’m not mechanical. Just fascinated. Once walked the old tracks of an ancestor’s long gone railroad to collect tie pieces.
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