Sunday, October 21, 2012

Pumpkins and trains

I'm not quite caught up on the backlog of photos but I thought I would share an update from this weekend. These are photos from the point and shoot camera...I'll upload some film shots later, when they're developed.

This is Larry's last weekend before he takes the professional engineer exam. Anthony and I wanted to give him as much peace and quiet as we could, so we went and did a photo stroll with my Seattle Flickr photo group. We went to a pumpkin farm, which was a lot of fun, but the best part was on the way home. We stopped by a real working diesel-electric train that lives in Woodinville. It lives behind a protective fence when it's not working, but the fellow who works on it most of the time was tinkering around on it this weekend, and he let us in to see it!

Me and my decorative gourd

Pumpkins

Anthony hamming it up

Anthony hamming it up

Gorgeous fall colors

Big maple leaf

It's organic, y'all

Pumpkins

Stalks

Anthony and me

Horse drawn wagon

Ducks

Ducks

Having fun at the hay maze

And then we saw the train. It was really neat. Basically, the state highway (SR-202) goes up from the pumpkin farm, which is in Carnation, past Redmond, and ends up passing part of a bunch of railroad lines in Woodinville. BNSF owns most of the railroad in that area, as far as I can tell, and they've decommissioned the entirety of it in Redmond. But in Woodinville, which is right next door, the trains still work, every day.

This one train, part of the Eastside Freight Railroad, stays behind a chain link fence with concertina wire, which is the stuff they use at prisons, to keep people out. Well, I didn't realize it was a working train...just figured it was a train museum or something. Lucky for us, we stopped by and checked it out, and this incredibly nice gentleman, Clyde, showed us around and let us in the engine room and on the caboose. I think it was the best day in Anthony's life, so far. Clyde even gave us a model railroad magazine and a bunch of pictures he'd taken of the train (and one of him in full conductor garb).

It was fun! Clyde gave us contact information. He said that, occasionally, they do private rides. We can call the railroad periodically to see when the next one is, and we might be able to go for a ride!

Checking out the trains electric motors

Anthony manning the controls

Manning the controls

The caboose

Anthony in the cupola

Here are Clyde's photos that he gave us.

Eastside Freight Railroad

Eastside Freight Railroad

Eastside Freight Railroad

Eastside Freight Railroad

Clyde the Conductor

No comments:

Post a Comment