Tag Archives: vehicles

Visit to The Shop

It is always strange when you have lived somewhere for a few years to find out about a place that is nearby, and you should have heard of but that you knew nothing of. Even more embarrassing is to find out from a friend of yours from another state that visited it while in the area and then told you! Such is the case with The Shop. Located in the SODO part of Seattle, I must have driven close to it more times than I can imagine.

This is a storage location in which people can keep their cars and even have restoration work undertaken (although the waiting list for the restoration guys is quite long apparently). There is a heated shed if you want to pay more or an unheated one if you are less fussed. When you want your vehicle, you let them know and they will retrieve it from the location in which it is stored (which might be above another vehicle or behind one) and you can drop off your daily driver for them to look after while you take out your precious beast.

They provide tours of the facility which, while quite brief, do give you a good look at what is stored there. There are some seriously expensive vehicles kept on site. A Ferrari Dino was one of the more valuable ones but not the most expensive while we were there. The young lad showing us around was happy to regale us with the information on some of the more unusual types on show. Owners were not generally discussed but they were not hiding that some of the vehicles belonged to Macklemore.

While there are some exotic vehicles in there, there are also some rough looking cars that are going to get restored at some point I imagine. They are clearly prized by their owners, but they might not be top of the list for others. Given how they are stored, it isn’t always easy to get a clear look at some of the more interesting vehicles – particularly if they are behind others and in the shade. Doesn’t stop you having a good nose around, though, even if the guide does keep you moving. They are not too officious and seem to welcome the fact you are curious.

Filming Crews and Their Serious Gear

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We came upon a few filming crews while we were in the Maasai Mara. There were professional photographers but more of the video teams. National Geographic had a crew out working and there were others filming too. You would sometimes find vehicles that were scouting crews for the filming. The thing I found funny was that they often had signs saying that they were filming crews and not to follow them. I might never have paid attention to them until I knew that they were filming crews and might well have good intel about where animals were!

Modified vehicles which allow the camera operator to sit outside the vehicle and shoot looked like just the sort of thing I would like to have. They weren’t always in use, though. I did see one operator sitting inside the vehicle with his feet up while checking stuff on his phone. Looking at the very pricey lenses attached to the camera rigs was almost as fun as looking at the animals. Nat Geo also had a vehicle with a gimbal mount out on the front of the vehicle. It would have been fun to see that in use!

One thing that occurred to me as I watched these teams at work was the volume of material that they would collect that would be culled down to make a TV show. Sure, this would be a vast amount of data to store and sort but how different this must be from the days of wet film. Those crews shooting things like the early Big Cat Diaries must have been carrying a ton of stock and then had to manage all of it through processing and cataloging. That must have been a very time consuming and expensive proposition.

Lots Of Light Rail Trains Ready To Go

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I visited the Sound Transit operations and maintenance facility in the south part of Seattle for meeting recently. This is the original facility but they have added one in Bellevue and another will be built in Federal Way in the coming years. Plenty of the trains were parked in the storage tracks including the original cars and the new ones getting delivered by Siemens for the extensions due to open soon. Too good to pass up the chance to grab some shots with my phone.

Vintage Japanese Rolling Stock

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Here are some old Japanese rail vehicles. These are part of the SCMaglev museum in Nagoya that I visited when I was in Japan last summer. The museum has a great selection of Shinkansen equipment across the generations but it also has a lot of other rail vehicles from long ago. The vehicles clearly look old from the outside but the interiors are really an interesting comparison with what you see these days. The amount of wood in the paneling and the materials of the seating are definitely of their time. I was quite amused by the fans mounted on the ceiling. Obviously pre-air conditioning days with these cars and so a bit of air circulation was all you could hope for. Knowing how incredibly hot it gets in Japan during the summer, they would not have done much for the riders I would have thought. I wonder whether it was as crowded in those days as it is now. If it was even close, that would have been brutal.

An Update to the Japanese Rail Photos

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I have put some previous posts together of Japanese trains from my travels. This is an update to that (although a very late update given that these were taken nearly a year ago!). I got to see some different trains while I was in Nagoya for the day and then there is the variety of trains that you get around the Tokyo area. There was also a small line that ran through the Kamakura area which we crossed paths with as we were walking to the beach from the giant Buddha statue that I wrote about in this post. A few more photos to amuse those of you that like different trains.