Early one morning I found myself in Davis CA meeting a colleague to head to a meeting. I picked him up at the station and arrived a few minutes ahead of time. Davis has a cool station building. I didn’t know anything about it so hadn’t come prepared. The trusty iPhone was all I had with me so here is an iPhone shot of the station in the early light.
One thing that Japan is famous for is their high speed rail network. The Shinkansen has been in service since the 1960s and has expanded to cover far more of the country while also becoming more popular and faster. I was heading from Tokyo to Toyohashi which meant taking a ride on the original line that runs to Osaka. This is the busiest line both from the perspective of passengers and frequency of service. The trains are very modern and comfortable running at speeds of close to 200mph. The speed is not the most interesting thing for me. Plenty of countries have fast trains these days. What is impressive is just how many of them are running.
There are fast and stopping services along the line. My first trip was on one of the stopping services. We would get to a station and stop for several minutes and would have one of two trains blast past us. Then we would be on our way again. One of my colleagues checked out the timetable and noted in one hour that 21 trains passed through Toyohashi. Our return leg was on one of the minimal stopping trains and it made the journey back in about one hour less than our outbound trip. Timing is everything it seems. The volume of trains traveling that fast was something else.
I did manage to get a few pictures of the trains while I was there. These were mainly as they pulled in to our station as we were traveling but I did get to see some of them come through at full speed. They really are motoring. They crest the hill and come into view quite a way off but that doesn’t give you much time. They are upon you in a heartbeat. I was stuck between wanted to get a picture and wanting to have an image that conveyed the speed. Unfortunately, with little time to experiment, I was pushed into making sure I got something.
I did also try to get passing shots of other trains while we were traveling. This was a crap shoot since they appear and disappear very fast. I was aiming to get a blurred nose on the view but, even at a high frame rate, this didn’t work out much. All of that said, here are a few Shinkansen shots.
I also got to see one of the original Series 0 cab cars while visiting the company we were seeing. They built it and have it as part of their collection. I was aiming to get a shot of it the day we left but the schedule got busy so that one will have to be a memory only.
A recent art fair was taking place in Chicago and we wandered over to see what was on display. I like these events because they always have an interesting mix of stuff. A few exhibitors have truly excellent work. A large number have stuff that is okay but not special. Then there are a few that are truly appaling. Some of these can be quite creepy and that is half the fun!
All of this is a distraction from the real point of this post. While we were at this event, I looked back towards the loop and realized that this street rose up and provided a great view straight down the elevated tracks of the L as they come through the loop. This looked like a spot I should probably come back to at a later stage. This I have now done.
The view along the tracks is best accentuated by a long lens. Since it is a street on a sunny day (I went in the morning at a time when the sun was supposed to be almost directly down the street since the high buildings around tend to shade everything), heat haze can be a bit of a problem. A winter visit would be good if that opportunity should ever present itself. Instead I shot a little video but also decided on another time lapse.
Luck was on my side this time. When we were at ISAP, there was a lot of discussion on video techniques. One thing that was mentioned was how much lead in and lead out footage should be shot to provide an editor with something to play with later. When shooting time lapse, that lead in time is long and you don’t know when the trains are going to come along. I just decided to start shooting while there was nothing there and see how things played out.
As it happened, I had a lot of time with nothing to make the lead in footage and then a bunch of trains showed up. They ran through for a while and then nothing for quite a while to provide the lead out. No planning on my part but it worked out perfectly. This is one of those clips that I am keeping for a larger project I might finally do about Chicago (probably long after we are gone!) and it will probably only be a very small part of the larger piece but here you can see all of it in one go.
While there might be changes afoot in Boeing’s production locations, Seattle is still the heart of what they build. A short distance from Boeing Field is Renton, the home of 737 production. However, the plant at Renton is an assembly facility as much as a production location and, while they do build chunks of the aircraft there, a substantial portion is made elsewhere.
Most notable of the parts coming from other places is the fuselage. Boeing used to own a plant in Wichita that builds the fuselages but they sold it a few years back and it now goes by the name of Spirit. The production of the fuselages is still done there under sub-contract and the finished fuselages are shipped to Renton by train. The train comes along the tracks right behind Boeing Field. Earlier in my visit I had been driving when a train with a couple of fuselages on it went by. I was pretty annoyed to have missed it. However, I would get lucky when another train with several more fuselages on board came by.
Supposedly the journey across is not always trouble free. There is no issue with the length of the fuselage. However, some of the residents along the route are not as concerned with the well-being of an expensive piece of airplane. Repairs are often required after they arrive including patching the occasional gun shots. I guess those people are not planning on flying on the plane any time soon or maybe they might be a little less cavalier!