Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: SDR-SW21

This is an excerpt of the video I took on the last day of the NRHS Convention, during the Father's Day excursion on the Green Mountain Railroad. This is a brutal cut from the original, as I needed it to be under 10 minutes, and under 30MB, so it's less than a fifth of the original cut, with the original MOD files being much longer.

Here's Green Mountain #405. This actually wasn't my first time riding behind this unit, as I had also ridden the entire length of the Green Mountain Railroad behind it in 1990.

This was on the final day of the 2015 NRHS Convention, which happened to fall on Father's Day. As a result, a special Father's Day excursion was run on the Green Mountain Railroad to Ludlow, Vermont from Rutland. The only motive power was Green Mountain #405, an Alco RS-1, which was behind me when I shot this. The coaching stock was the same that had been used for the previous excursions that I had been on.

This was the excursion to Hoosic Junction mentioned in my earlier photo from North Bennington. My camera battery started to die when we got to North Bennington, so footage beyond that point is not included. To reiterate, this excursion included Vermont Railway #301, an EMD GP40, and #311, a GP40-2LW, for motive power, and Green Mountain Railroad coaching stock. You can see Amtrak's Ethan Allen Express at the beginning.

This was about where I discovered that the Pentax MZ-10 wouldn't be working for the convention, so this video starts as we arrive in Florence, Vermont, where Omya have a Limestone quarry and slurry plant. This excursion was operated by Vermont Railway EMD GP40 #301, and GP40-2LW #311, using Green Mountain Railroad passenger stock.

After taking the Eurostar to Brussels, the next leg of the trip to Prague is from Brussels Midi to Koln Hbf, where there is the sleeper train, EC457 the "Phoenix," to Prague, which departs at 2228, and gets into Prague at 0925 the next day. In km/h, the Phoenix isn't necessarily slow (if I'm not mistaken, it's allowed to go 200), but the trip takes all night due to a 20-minute stop in Berlin Sudkreuz, and more importantly, the fact that it runs via Berlin at all. In this video, however, I'm still on the ICE, enjoying close to 250 km/h running.

After changing trains via the London Underground widened lines from Paddington to St. Pancras, to took the Eurostar to Brussels-Midi. For several years, these were the fastest trains I had ever ridden, as they operate at 190 m.p.h. in Britain. I recently found out through research (not my stopwatch) that I broke my record several months after I took this video, as I had unknowingly ridden at 330 km/h, or 205 m.p.h., on the TGV Duplex between Strasbourg and Paris. I remember the ride was fast, but that's it. The train was very overcrowded, I didn't have a window seat, and ultimately I didn't take any photos or video, which is a shame.

This is the first of a series of short railfan videos that I took out of train windows while traveling from Cardiff to Prague. "Railfan" is an important qualifier here. I didn't expect any of these videos to be spectacular by themselves, Instead, they're aimed primarily (maybe only) at railfans who like to watch high-speed train videos. Technically, in modern terms, these Intercity 125 diesel trains, introduced in 1976, aren't high-speed in the modern sense. This is because their maximum legal speed is, and has always been, 125 m.p.h., or about 200 km/h, while the threshold for modern high-speed trains is about 210 km/h, set by the Japanese Series 0 bullet trains in 1966. However, the Series 0 bullet trains ran at 200 km/h from 1964 to 1966, and when the Intercity 125 diesel trains were being developed by British Railways in the 1970s, they were referred to as, literally, "High Speed Trains," or HSTs. Today, they're still often called HSTs, and remain some of the fastest diesel trains in the world, 39 years after being introduced to regular service.

This was the first serious video (of more than a few seconds) that I shot of the CD system after New Year's. This was on April 29th, and the weather was already improving, although overall the summer was mild until late August, when it finally started getting hot. This video includes a Class 451 "Pantograph" EMU, and a Class 130 electric locomotive working as a pusher on a freight. Class 130's used to be a little bit rare in Prague, but I've been seeing a lot of them on freight trains lately. They look like 1950's locomotives, but they were actually all built in 1977 by Skoda. They each have 2736 horsepower (2040Kw), and a maximum speed of 100Km/h, which may explain why they aren't used much on passenger trains anymore.

This was from March 25th, making it one of the earlier mainline videos I got after New Year's Break. I don't expect this to make it into the NRHS show (I don't think), so it's ideal for iPernity. The locomotive is a Class 162 electric, with 4667 horsepower (3480Kw) and a maximum speed of 140Km/h (86 m.p.h.), although it's going far slower here.

This is a special sneak preview of my next NRHS show, and as such it's very much excerpted and low-resolution. The final show will be a roughly 70-minute video. In any case the cameraphone shots that I took on this day aren't too impressive, and I wanted something to mark the spot in my iPernity collection. This was a steam special on the JHMD, covering the usual summer steam route to Nova Bystrice (although only fragments are on this video). In the wintertime, the steam locomotives normally don't run. This locomotive is an ex-PKP (Polish Railways) Px48 (Some sources say Lxd2, I don't know which is right) Class 0-8-0, currently numbered #T48.001 (original works number 3073, original PKP #1916), built by Fabryka Lokomotyw im.F.Dzierzynskiego Chrzanow in 1953.

I'm saving the video and photos of Ex-CSD #498.022, the "Albatros," for my NRHS shows, so here's another shot I got while at Radotin, of an outbound express.

Here's another version of the previous shot that has been edited for maximum contrast and saturation short of making it look like a painting. For some reason, shots from the video camera get vignetting when you crank the contrast up, and I have no idea why that is.

Completed in 1968, this futuristic looking hotel resembling an antenna is also exactly that, a television tower. It was also featured in the Czech film "Grand Hotel." I've tried to photograph it many times, but I've almost always been too far away, even though I've visited Liberec twice. This time I tried getting the shot with a video camera that had a still function. The resolution on the camera was awful, worse than my cameraphone, but the reason I wanted to try it was that it had a 25X digital zoom. Actually, it had a 700X digital zoom, but beyond 25X the resolution was so low that it was pointless. After uploading the .jpg to my Mac, I still had to edit the image for higher contrast because the cloud cover had played more of a role than I had foreseen.