hacked by cyber_hunter

I just uploaded photos from my last two trips to Seashore on September 27 and October 10.  They start with number 211 on this page (in the 5th row).  The latter date, btw, was Transit Day, so there was quite a lot happening.  In between regular trips to Talbott Park with 1267 and 434D were two photo runbys at Messerve’s Crossing, featuring 01000/0210 and the train of R9s (the “A train”).  As with last year, I was in charge of the photo line at Messerve’s.  Special rides were done on 01000/0210; the A train; Chicago, North Shore & Milwaulkee interurban car 755; #4 Cambridge-Dorchester car 0719 (making its first trip up the main line in over 25 years); and Wheeling Traction Co. car 639, the latter being for members only, as the shop is still doing finishing touches to it.  There was also some stuff involving the buses and trackless trolleys, but I paid little attention to that.  Although the day started off rainy when I left Boston, the rain had stopped by the time I reached Portsmouth, NH and the clouds gradually cleared away during the day.  The only downside was that my camera’s battery died around 3:30PM, so I missed a few opportunities for shots.

The photos in this update are also the first ones from my new Panasonic ZS3 that I’ve uploaded. The ZS3 replaces my old Canon SD400, with which I’ve become dissatisfied over the years. The new camera takes better photos, with noticeably less noise at higher ISO speeds. It also has a bunch of features which outclass all comparable cameras from Canon, particularly the ability to set a minimum shutter speed to use and to optically zoom while shooting video. It can shoot video at 720P, although the quality is relatively poor.

This is a little late, but I’ve finished posting all the new photos I took whilst doing the station map photo survey.

Red Line - the first few photos on this page are from an earlier railfanning expedition, but the rest were taken during the survey.

Blue Line - new photos start on the third row with number 60.

Science Park - most of the last two rows starting with number 14. My first photos there since the elevated was torn down.

Lechmere - the last three photos are new.

D-Riverside Line - new photos start with the last one on this page, although the first six are from a decade ago and were scanned in over the summer.

Commuter Rail - I’ve scrapped the original page and created separate pages for each line. New photos can be found in the pages for North Station, South Station, and Boston to Braintree. The latter is the only one with photos taken from the survey; the other two have photos that I’ve taken over the past several years.

Mattapan-Ashmont High Speed Line - the last four photos are new.

Enjoy!

I finished up the last processing work for the photos I took for the station map photo survey over the past week, so I finally have time to work on the photos I took for myself during that time. Up first is the Blue Line. On September 2nd I was out covering Wood Island to Wonderland, getting photos at most of the stations on that half of the line. The exception was Wood Island, where a work crew was removing the top layer of the platform with some jackhammers. I was not inclined to stay around any longer than I had to to get the map photos I was officially there for. I’ll have to go back another time. The photos I did get, though, start here with the last one on the third row.

Coming soon will be photos of the Red Line, Green Line, and Commuter Rail. The latter will take the longest to do because I think the best way to do it is scrap my existing gallery and create new ones for each line. Otherwise it’s a real pain in the ass to update the existing gallery.

And I haven’t had one for the past week either. One of the current projects at CTPS is a photo survey of all the maps at the T’s stations, and guess who one of the main contributors to that project is? Yep, yours truly. I’ve been spending several hours a day out taking photos, and several more hours at home editing them. On top of that, school starts on Tuesday, so I’ll have that to deal with as well. The flip side of having all this work to do is that I’m also photographing the trains while I’m out there, so once I have time to work on those photos I’ll have a bunch of updates to my MBTA pages. In the meantime, though, it’s gonna be a busy couple of weeks.

Well, a lot has happened on the site since I last updated the blog. My photo scanning project is mostly complete now, with only my slides from Railcamps 2000 and 2001 left to do. All my shots from Europe (those worth scanning, that is) have been scanned. I have posted selections of photos from the first five trips I took to Europe, which can be found here. I’ll post photos from my trip to England in a few days.

Last weekend I was up at Seashore for the 4th of July trolley parade. A couple of cars that rarely see the light of day go pulled out and shown to people. Photos of that are here.

Yesterday, since I had to go into Boston anyway to pick up work at CTPS, I brought my camera with me and spent a few hours photographing the Tall Ships that are in Boston this week. It was quite an interesting collection of vessels.

I’ll be heading up to Seashore again tomorrow. Boeing 3424 finally got trucked up there yesterday, so I’ll be getting photos of that. Hopefully it’ll be ready to run soon. That will be cool.

First thing’s first: I have new photos up of Seashore (starting with the last 3 images on that page) and the Mattapan Line (summer photos on that page and the next). I also have a new photo at the bottom of my Funny Photos page. Enjoy!

Classes are out for the summer, which means I still have plenty of work to do. Besides data entry for CTPS and railfanning, I have two major projects I’m working on. First is an iPhone app I’ve been thinking of for a while. I finally got a book on iPhone development, so I’ll be starting that project once I get the other project out of the way.

The other project, which is currently being worked on, is scanning in my photos from my trips to Europe. I recently upgraded to iLife ‘09, and the new version of iPhoto includes this neat feature called Places which lets you geotag your photos. It then produces a map with pins wherever you took photos. So now I’m busy scanning photos so I can populate the map. I am uncertain if I will post those photos online. If I do, it will be a limited subset due to space limitations on my server. Regardless, it’s fun going through those photos again and remembering all the places I’ve been.

Last Friday I went over to Cambridge to have the hard drive in my MacBook Pro replaced with a larger one. Since I had a few hours to spare while that was being done, I went and took some shots from the nearby BU Bridge and the Boston College branch of the Green Line. My shots of the B line are here, while those of other subjects are here.

I was rather surprised today when I went into Boston to pick up work for next week from CTPS to find Boeing LRV 3448, the track geometry car, parked on the siding on the outbound platform at Boylston.  Usually 3448 buried in the yard at Riverside, making it difficult to get shots of it.  I didn’t hesitate to take advantage of its unusual location by getting plenty of close-up shots; it’ll probably be gone by tomorrow.  A few of those shots can be found here.  Interestingly, the interior of the car is mostly intact from its days in regular service, with most of the seats still in place.  Only in the A end did they remove some seats to install the systems for scanning the track. 

I did some more railfanning last Saturday with my friend Bernie, mostly on the Blue Line.  I’ve added some shots from Airport and Suffolk Downs to my Blue Line pages.  While we were at Suffolk Downs, we came across a much younger railfan out taking videos of the trains with his dad.  Hopefully he’ll stay interested in trains.  Later on we headed to South Station, where I caught coach 762, which was one of the cars to get shrink-wrapped with the T’s “No.  Brainer.” ad from last summer when gas prices hit $4 a gallon.  I have some photos of that, but due to the backlog of commuter rail photos I need to put up, I haven’t uploaded them.

Today I boldly ventured out into the blizzard we’re having to take some photos of the trolleys at Valley Road.  Those photos can be found here.

Last Sunday I went up to Seashore again to help out with the last day of Christmas Prelude. It turned out that, due to the ice storm a few days previously, operations were canceled all weekend (Seashore was without power until Saturday night), and no one had bothered to send out an email about that. I did take a few photos of the ice-encrusted trees while I was there. This is the only shot that really came out well.

I’ve uploaded some new photos of the Red Line and Mattapan trolley at Ashmont.  The Red Line photos are on the second half of this page, and the trolley ones start with the last six on this page.