Archive for January, 2008

How can I be so positive in my assessment?  Here’s how…

 1.  Its very foggy.  Amtrak Cascades train 500 of the 27th departs Vancouver shrouded in heavy fog.  With the recent power issues the Cascades are having it probably a good thing a Dash-8 is supplying the power today.

2.  Rail cars exiting the Gorge are covered in snow.  Thanks to a good dose of snow between Skamania and Bingen even trains that park at Eighth Street for a few hours, like this grain train, are still covered in the white stuff.

3.  Trains have snow on the nose.  It looks like this M-SPOLVJ enjoyed the brunt of the storm as it passed between Bingen and Skamania.

Winter’s still here!

It finally happened!  I was reunited with an old friend and old friends do what old friends do, they conjure up memories.  My happy reunion caused me not to reflect so much on myself but on 25 years of railroading and how much or how little it has changed.

What changes in 25 years of railroading?  That could be a challenging question to answer depending on which 25 year period you choose.  Take the period 1983 to 2008 for example.   1983 was early on in the Staggers era and railroads were just exiting their dark ages.  Freight was still defined based on what would fit inside freight cars not what could be stacked on top.  Fuel economy wasn’t critical and track capacity was shrinking.   For railroading it was a time of transition from decline to growth.

Clearly railroads were different in 1983 compared to today, but were they really? 

BN 8127 waits patiently on the point of an eastbound freight at Parkwater, WA in 1983. 
Did she have any idea of the changes ahead? 

My reunion caused me to look carefully at my old friend, the 8127.  Has she changed in 25 years?   Sure, ditch lights were added so the increasing numbers of people don’t run into her and the horn was moved to help those that control her to hear long after their retirement.  The rotating safety beacon was stripped to save costs and flags were added as badges of support for a distant war.   The railroad that owned her merged with a kid named Chico and when her original lease was up she was sent to be part of a surge fleet, no longer a regular player.    

Did all of these superficial things change the way the 8127 did her job?  Not really.  In 2008 she’s still doing what she does best, making horsepower and moving freight.  No different than 1983.  In 25 years locomotive technology has bypassed her but her basic skill is still in great demand.   Her still present ability to move freight ties the years together and shows that some parts of railroading are no different today than 25 years ago. 

To my old friend, the 8127, I say keep up the good work and I look forward to our next reunion. 

FURX 8127 waits patiently on the point of an eastbound freight at Vancouver, WA in 2005. 
25 years later does she have any idea of the changes that occurred?

With the recent news from Arlington I thought a photo from a more peaceful time would be appropriate.

Over the holidays I considered converting my photo catalog from Photoshop Elements Organizer to Photoshop Lightroom’s Library.   There are lots of reasons to convert but the overriding item for me is how the Library and Develop pieces are more integrated than in my current work flow.   On top of that Lightroom allows me more access to meta data which as time goes on will be more and more important.   After I set up a test catalog in Lightroom to see how things would look I found the steps I used to catalog images in Organizer would be about the same in Lightroom.  At that point the decision was made.

Now to convert.  I thought it couldn’t be all that hard to convert because Lightroom has an “Import from Elements” option built right in.  Software developers you can stop reading here, you know what happens next… 

As with any conversion there are some things which must be done to the ’source’ data to make it more usable in the ‘target’ system.  I carefully read several posts on the preparation needed and once done I fired it off.  Happily I could sit and watch as Lightroom imported my photos and tags and went about the process of organizing every thing in the Library.  In a geeky way it was fun! 

When the conversion finished the first thing I noticed is that some of my Organizer Tags did not land in the Lightroom keywords in the same hierarchy.  As I snooped around some and I found the keywords outside the hierarchy were simply duplicated so deleting them would solve that issue.  Various discussions around the Adobe Lightroom forum confirmed my conclusion.  At that point I estimated 30 minutes or less to correct.  So far so good. 

The next thing I noticed was the captions were missing.  Oh oh, that’s not good, that’s my record of train symbols and other miscellaneous facts at the time the photo was captured.  Back to the forums I went looking for how to convert the captions.  After hours of digging it became apparent the captions on RAW files just weren’t converting from the Organizer database to Lightroom.  Lightroom’s conversion was always taking the caption from the image meta data instead of pulling it out of Organizer’s database.   Some quick math told me I had just over 5,000 images with captions.  To quote Aaron “That’s a lot of copy and paste”.

Lightroom is a fabulous product and it is where I want my catalog to end up.  With each version it becomes more and more bug free so my hope is in one of the upcoming releases this conversion item is addressed.  If its not, I will likely make the decision to convert anyway and do the copy and paste.   Hey, my daughter is always wanting to earn money maybe she’d do it? 

 For now I’m back to Organizer.

Where’s my caption?

This is kind of embarrassing.  I have worked in inner Southeast Portland since February, and Amtrak comes through during my lunch hour, yet this is the first time I’ve actually taken a shot of the train.  This is train #504 from Eugene, shown here as it zips north ducking under the Belmont/Morrison overpasses today around 11:45.

My recent family vacation led me nowhere near an active railroad, so instead I’ll throw something up that I found online. It’s an interesting video montage of the life of a conductor, set to, appropriately, a song titled “You Are A Conductor” by The Constantines. From the early-morning on-duty call to a bunch of cab ride footage, you’ll enjoy this: