To Shiny Rails

Omaha’s Durham Museum is in the 1930-vintage art deco railroad station. Quite the building and a considerably interesting museum inside. I was thoroughly taken by the statues throughout depicting life-in-action at the station at various periods of time. There was a traveling exhibit there this day of Pulitzer Prize winning photos. Fascinating. And a real soda fountain with real hot fudge sundaes, which we had to try. All my photos are here.

Lynn and I stopped in North Platte, NE on the way to Omaha for a reason… To visit the Bailey Yard and the Golden Spike Tower. Wow, that’s one big yard! All the photos are here.

While the boys caught fish in Palmer Lake, I caught this UP Heritage Fleet locomotive #1989 rolling by Palmer Lake with a unit train of windmill blades. Thanks to the guys on the bridge that let me know it was coming. I noted a bunch of railfan-looking guys with cameras (you know the look) on the pedestrian bridge over the tracks to the lake and asked if anything special was coming. They didn’t say what, but they did say it was three trains away coming from the north. It came by a little over an hour later and was indeed the third train to go by. You should always keep your radio scanner in the car.

“‘Game of Thrones’ author George RR Martin just bought a historic American railroad he wants to restore for sightseeing, film shoots, and even escape rooms on rails”

Complete article.

With about one 24-hour period to spare, I found out that the Center for Railroad Photography and Art was going to do its annual conference online this year and offer it for free to anyone that wanted to join. So I registered and “attended.” It was all day (well, 9-4ish in our time zone) and we saw seven presentations, six photo related and one art related. The conference kept my attention, and I joined as a member at the end of the day (along with about a dozen other folks). Attendance was above 400 all day (you could track how many were “on” the Webex conference constantly). We were told all the sessions would be on CPR&A’s YouTube channel eventually.

We took a cruise around the northern Mediterranean Sea then on to the Champagne region of France. And along the way we managed to see and ride a couple trains. We rode the Roma Express from the coast into Rome, and we road the overnight train from Venice to Paris and then a short hop by subway to Bailly-Romainvilliers which would be our quarters for the Champagne excursions. All the train photos are here. The whole trip starts here.