Apparently the RSS reader Pluck doesn’t properly display the images I post on the blog such as the one yesterday of the stack train in storm lighting.
I’m trying to figure out if this is a widespread issue amongst many readers, or if it’s just Pluck having issues. I’ve verified that the Google Reader and Bloglines both display images correctly.
Anyone else care to report success or failure with another reader?
This shot was taken during a rare break in the rain showers last Friday. A westbound stack train passes under storm clouds at Holt on the BNSF Stockton Sub.
Those of you with publication aspirations might check out National Geographic’s Your Shot contest…
I’ve been busy since returning from my California trip and am gradually getting to editing photos. Taking care of my sick wife and daughter has to take precedence.
As I get photos edited, I’ll post some here, and some over in my gallery as appropriate. If you want to keep up with new gallery additions, either look for the “New” or “Updated” notes on the gallery homepage, or subscribe to my gallery RSS feed. I made the first new post tonight, Pipes on the Delta.
I had heard a few times that the shows presented at the “night before Winterail” pizza party were usually really good, and sometimes better than the shows at Winterail itself. This year the party was sponsored by Railfan & Railroad magazine. After some initial hesitation I decided to attend and also present at this event. Here’s what I thought:
Shows: The quality of the shows ranged from very good to very ungood. From what I could tell, the lineup was first-come, first-served, so there was no screening of content or quality of the shows beforehand. Format was a mixture of digital shows (using ProShow) along with some traditional slide presentations. Shows which stand out in my mind were Ken Storey’s “Great Railfan Trip 2005″ which presented a selection of excellent photos from the western United States of both freight action and the UP 3985, along with Ken Harrison’s show featuring railroad operations in Brazil. Steve Barry presented “Steve’s Steamy Shorts” which were fun to watch. Nate Muhlethaler narrated a show featuring Mexican railroads which was informative as well as having a good variety of photos. Robert Scott presented his show featuring North Dakota railroading which I had previously seen. Barry Christensen presented “Gateways to the South” which darn near bored me to death, with average-quality images of modern freight trains in the southeastern US. Nose-coupled Dash 9 roster shots just don’t excite me. Overall the show quality was about what I expected, some good ones and some bad ones.
Facilities: The theater worked fine for the crowd of 100-150 people, and didn’t have the ventilation issues that would be seen the next day at the main Winterail show.
Show Organization: I’ve got two things to say about the show organization, neither one of them good. The timekeeping was very poor. 20% of the presenters weren’t able to show anything because some other presenters shows went longer than their allotted slots and took up too much time. The folks running the show allowed a couple of the live-narrated slideshows to go on for longer than the 15 minute limit which had been stated. Given that a few of the digital shows (such as mine, at 7 minutes) were far shorter than 15 minutes, the fact that they ran out of time shows serious time-management problems.
Perhaps my bigger frustration was the lack of planning or organization for the projection of digital shows. I don’t know to what extent the Winterail and Railfan & Railroad folks cooperated for the sharing of equipment and such, so these are merely observations from a presenter. When I got there, I was told to give my show (on CD) to Alex Ramos, who took it but admitted he didn’t know exactly what he was doing. After several minutes he came back out of the building, apparently having been told that “the Winterail people” wouldn’t let him load the Friday presentations onto the Winterail computer. As such, he had no idea what computer was going to be used to show the digital shows. One of the guys I was with (another attendee) happened to have his laptop along, so his laptop ended up being used to present the digital shows. Once we got the shows rolling so to speak, it became obvious that the digital projector had some color issues… the color tones were off, as well as all of the images being noticeably darker than they should have been. Several of the photos in my presentation lost a lot of detail that just became black because of the darkening of the images.
Who hosts a digital slideshow without a computer to project the images? And why wasn’t the projector tested to ensure the colors were correct?
Food: For $7 I expected more than two slices of shitty Domino’s pizza. Evan Werkema was overheard exclaiming “That stuff is worse than Tombstone!” I understand that the profits went to rail preservation, but what a joke.
Overall: A few of the shows were interesting. The lack of show organization and time management left a sour taste in my mouth along with the sour taste of crappy, limited-quantity pizza. Would I go again? Doubtful.
After my first Winterail I figured I shoul post my thoughts, coming from someone who both loves good railroad photography, and someone who runs GorgeRail which is a smiliar (but smaller) show.
Shows: The shows were overall very good. The quality and format of the shows was very comparable to GorgeRail. In fact, one of the best shows was Jeff Bass‘ “Tones, Textures, Colors, Faces. Railroading” which was origially presented at GorgeRail 2005. Other shows which stand out for one reason or another were George Hiotis’ “Suburban Symphony” which was a brilliant exposition of the many facets of big-city transit railroading and “Wheat Country” by Bob Clarke, Ruth Hillis and Mark Perry, which was a very nice show which wasn’t about trains, but rather included trains as a part of the overall image and photographic portrayal of life in the rural farmlands in the center of the continent.. The video presentation of Bay-Area steam from the 50’s was very nice, as was Kit Courter’s “While You Were Sleeping” which is easily the best nighttime-photography exposition I have ever seen. A couple shows stick out as needing some improvement (at least from my perspective). One was Tim Tonge’s Abo Canyon show, which was far too repetitive and would have been a good show if it was half as long. Warren McGee’s NP presentation had some great photographs, but the poor audio recording was frustrating for the viewer. The show on the 3751 had some very nice photography and did an excellent job of capturing the human element to the operation of a steam locomotive, but there were far too many pans/zooms and other effects in the show which became distracting.
Facilities: The theater facility was adequate and appropriate for the number of attendees. At first I questioned the length/duration of the the intermissions, but I realized that the logistics of getting 1,000 people in/out of the theater and to/from the restrooms required the intermissions as planned. I do wonder if it might have been more efficient to show a couple shows before going to a 20-25 minute intermission rather than having a 20 minute show followed by a 20 minute intermission. For my money, I’d like to spend as much time watching shows as possible. I’d heard the rumors of the top of the theater being hot and stinky, and those rumors were confirmed. Our seats were near the front, but I walked up top, and it was much warmer, and noticably smellier. The ventilation system apparently wasn’t functioning properly, but since this is an ongoing issue I would expect the show organizers to be on top of things.
Show Organization: I was especially interested in watching the flow and organization of the slideshows. I ended up learning a few new tips/tricks which we’ll implement at GorgeRail but overall things were as I expected. Timekeeping was pretty good, with things never falling more than 5-8 minutes behind the advertised schedule. From a technical standpoint the show was flawless… every presentation was played without any technical issues, and the audio seemed very good (with the exception of the Warren McGee show, and that was a problem with the show, not the presentation setup). I commend Vic and Evan on maintaining an efficient flow to the evening.
Overall: I had a great time. The overall quality of the shows was very good, the event was well-organized, and I had fun. Would I go again? Definitely.
Stay tuned for my thoughts and opinions on the Friday night pizza party / slideshow hosted by Railfan & Railroad.
Tomorrow morning I hop on a plane for a short flight down to Sacramento, where I will be spending four days related to Winterail. In addition to attending the main Winterail show, I’m presenting a short program on the Mt. Hood Railroad at the Railfan & Railroad pizza party tomorrow night. The remainder of the time will be spent railfanning… exact plans are pending but I hope to spend time in the East Bay area, along the Cal-P, Franklin Canyon, and the Feather River Canyon.
Being the locomotive-chasing fool that I am, I plan to visit the yards in Roseville, Stockton, and Richmond. I’m up to date on my locomotive database tonight; I’ve recorded 13,323 locomotive sightings for a total of 6,875 unique locomotives. Breaking 7k on this trip would be neat but isn’t likely to happen unless I get extremely lucky. A couple of lucky bastards called me tonight to gloat that they’d just got done taking some night shots of UP 1983 at Roseville (earlier they were chasing a train led by SP 101 on Donner).
Say hi at Winterail, I’ll be the guy wandering around in the dogcaught.com hat 
Things haven’t been overly exciting around Vancouver lately, the weather has been gray and various forms of wet. Train traffic has been light due to heavy maintenance on the Fallbridge sub, and all of the interesting locomotives have been parked buried at the shops rather than leading trains. That said, I have managed to take a few photos.
From the “strange bedfellows” department, a pair of ES44s along with a warbonnet GP60M:
This struck me as an interesting pose as I snapped this photo:
And the new angle where I found one could get some elevation without blatantly trespassing, this is a 3-hour late #27 approaching 8th street with the towers of the Interstate Bridge in the background:
I’m still not thrilled with this, particularly the shadow, but I really think there’s a shot to be had here:
Today is the day… as I drove by at lunchtime, crews were erecting a chain link construction fence around the parking lot (and popular railfan photo location) at the former Crossing Restaurant at 8th street.
Sigh.
On a happy note, I found a new spot for photos, and will post something mediocre later tonight. It’s hard to get better than mediocre when it’s raining/snowing sideways, lightly, but nothing is sticking.
Since day one, I’ve offered a RSS Feed for this site.
However, I know that a lot of you don’t use RSS. I bet that almost all of you use e-mail. Recently I’ve had a couple people tell me about Squeet, a service which will turn an RSS feed into an e-mail notification.
In English, this means if you want to get an e-mail every time I post something new on this site, go to http://www.squeet.com, fill out the form - Dogcaught’s RSS feed is at http://www.dogcaught.com/feed/ and you will then get an e-mail delivered to your inbox every time I post something new.
I made my frequent Sunday morning loop this morning, heading over to Albina yard, then Barnes, then back to Vancouver to see what locomotives I could find. The catch of the day was a pair of Loram GP40s at Barnes (LMIX 110 and LMIX 111), looking very nice and clean in the yellow and black Loram paint scheme. I wasn’t in a position to get a photo without getting in trouble, so I didn’t.
The oddity for the day was catching a pair of AC4400s running long hood forward dragging an auto train towards Barnes.
A southbound UP Z train at the Vancouver depot had an interesting leased unit… here’s a cab side view:
As a bonus image, here’s a shot I took on the 2nd of the interesting variety of power parked at the Vancouver shops. I like the absence of orange.
I’m excited to announce a few new things related to GorgeRail.
First, we’ve added another presenter to the lineup. Scott Brons will be showing The Yakima Valley and Stampede Pass Subs, a look at railroad activity on the line since the reopening in 1995.
If you’ve been considering riding Amtrak as part of your journey to or from GorgeRail, you can save 10% off the lowest available fare by using a promotional code that Amtrak is providing for GorgeRail attendees. More information can be found here.
Registration is moving along swiftly. We now have more people registered for this year’s event than we did at the time of the event last year. If you haven’t yet purchased your ticket, you can do so at anytime… register early to avoid any last-minute hassles (or the potential for the show to sell out).
All of the presenter information, registration details, and more can be found on the GorgeRail website
I’ve had some errands keeping me from being trackside for photos this week but here’s a moldy oldie from a couple years ago, with a grain train climbing out of Ludlow towards Ash Hill on the Needles Subdivision.
Random trivia for the day courtesy of Steve: the Union Pacific Railroad invented the ski chair lift
Observation: Railfans are an interesting bunch, especially when it comes to finances. They will spend thousands of dollars on photography and videography equipment, and hundreds of dollars on travel expenses. Then they’ll bitch when they need to pay a $5 fee to park somewhere.
I make this observation with the full knowledge I fit into this odd grouping. Last fall I spent money to fly to Boise and back and rent a car, yet I’ve never shot a photo from the west end of the Horsethief Lake causeway because I’ve been too cheap to pay the $5 entrance fee.
I got an e-mail from someone today asking about the origin of the term “Dogcaught” and “Dogcatch crew”. For the new, in the US there is a federal regulation that train crews cannot work more than a 12 hour shift… after their 12 hours are over, they cannot work any more and the train must be left where it is. The replacement crew which is sent out to relieve this is referred to as a “dogcatch crew” and once they’re on the train, the train is “dogcaught”. As I understand it, the term came about because back in the “old days” when railroads were run efficently, a slow train that couldn’t make it between crew changes was referred to as a “dog” by crews. Hence the relief crew went out to “catch” the “dog” of a train.
If anyone else has any other history of the term, feel free to comment!
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