My Journey Through 2008
To celebrate 2008 I assembled a program to show off my favorite railroad photos from the places I visited this year. Assembling this program gave me a great retrospective on the year and the fun I had pursuing my hobby.
I’d say 2008 was a pretty good year and I feel I came out with some nice photographs. According to Lightroom I shot just over 3700 railroad images this year which is up by 20% over the previous year. Keep in mind I did this in a year where gas prices arguably were an issue for railfanning but in the end they didn’t impact the photo total. Based on photo counts from the various trips I took I seemed to take fewer total trips but the total number of photos taken on each trip was much greater.
Fuel prices did impact the fall trip with the FoamersNW crew as we chose to stay close to home and skip paying the airlines to get us there. The end result was some of my favorite images from the year taken along BNSF’s Lakeside Sub. So from what seemed like a failed trip something good was made.
What will 2009 hold? Real hard to tell. With the slowing economy I’d expect freight traffic to be down a bit early which will mean fewer and shorter trains. I’d also expect that sometime in ‘09 the economy will pick up so hopefully by this time next year there is more optimism and freight traffic will be on the rise.
Where do I plan to go in 2009? So far the list is:
Central Montana
Tucson, AZ
Bellingham Sub
Kootenai River Sub
Nampa Sub
….plus the usual events (GorgeRail, Autumn Leaf, Hot Rail, Winter in the Blues)
….plus the usual haunts (Columbia Gorge, Vancouver, Seattle Sub)
These are of course the wish list and are subject to change but are all locations I’d love to spend a few days railfanning.
With that look to next year, have a happy and prosperous New Year and sit back and enjoy Detours, Deserts, and Snow (4 min 44 sec).
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