Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: amtrak

This was taken in 1994 on the former Pennsylvania Railroad mainline (then Conrail) on the famous Horseshoe Curve near Altoona. Amtrak still operated the Broadway Limited between New York and Chicago, and this was it, headed by two EMD F40PHs, both now retired. The Broadway Limited has, for now, been replaced by the Manhattan Limited in Amtrak's timetable, and now all the power for the Philadelphia-Chicago (or at least Harrisburg-Chicago) leg is provided by G.E. Genesis P42s. This has always been one of my favorite "train" shots, even if it isn't great by the standards of orthodox photography, with no abstraction, merely average colors, too-perfect light, and nothing of interest to the non-railfan.

This was taken from a train passing through the Harmon, NY railroad yard in 1994. It looks like it would require good equipment, but it just so happened that in spite of shooting through a tinted window with a Kodak Star 735 point-and-shoot ($75 total cost), I still got the shot.

When I took this, Amtrak ran a seperate Sunday schedule for trains #68 and 69, the "Adirondack" service from NYP-Montreal, with the Sunday Adirondack getting numbers 70 and 71. I've always liked this shot, even if many "serious" photographers haven't. It is a bit abstract, as you can't see the features of the train, so it's more an emotional than a "tech" shot. I hope you like it. :-)

I've always liked this photo, even if many serious photographers haven't. They say it's "boring," but most of them aren't railfans! From the technical point of view, the contrast is a bit low, but since it was a gloomy Plattsburgh winter day, if I were to up the contrast on this, the detail and the grit of the scene would be lost. For the railfans, though, it's a nice shot of an F40PH in the last years of F40 haulage on Train #68, the "Adirondack."

This photo is a little bit grainy, which is a result of a high-contrast print being fed into a primitive scanner. I apologize in advance for that, but I posted it anyway because I love the composition. Maybe in the future I'll post a rescanned one, but for now this will have to do.

This was taken minutes after my "arriving in" shot, which has gotten so much attention. I've been praised for the puddle reflection on this shot, but I'm posting this mainly because it goes with the other one.

Back when the Rohr Turboliners were mostly unrebuilt, they operated over the entire Empire Corridor (ex-New York Central Water Level Route), and I rode them a few times before they were first withdrawn, then rebuilt and reintroduced on a dedicated NYP-Albany-Rensselaer service. If you're a New York railfan, you know the story. If you're wondering how I got into the shop, it was an organized tour. These things always require a lot of permissions and paperwork, of course, and I haven't been able to get back there since.

I took this in the summer of 1997, but now I don't remember which private car this was. The lettering on it is too hard to read in this scan, too, so any help in identifying it would be welcome. :-)

This was the first look I ever got at a G.E. Genesis P32, in Albany-Rensselear on my way back from Washington, DC (after I had had my first-ever train ride at over 90 m.p.h.). Some people have said that this shot is blurry. That's because the camera was a point-and-shoot, and the scan wasn't top-notch either. Oh well... In those days, the P32s didn't work all the way to Buffalo and Niagara Falls as they do now, but were cut off at Albany-Rensselaer just as the old FL9s had been (and still were when I took this). We had an F40PH take us the rest of the way home, and that was my second-fastest-ever trip on a train as of then!!!

Being one of the first U.S. railroad stations built exclusively for electric trains (although not the first, as the second, and current, Grand Central Terminal, as well as C.U.T. both preceded it), 30th Street Station was nevertheless built to the grandiose standards of the steam era. This is the main concourse, still decorated for Christmas, on Boxing Day, 2000.

Here's a larger view of the large waiting room in which the statue insert in Pictures 2 and 3 was placed.

This was my first ever shot of an Amtrak Acela Express high speed tilt train, in this case trailed (notice the markers are lit) by power car (locomotive) #2031. We were over a half hour late, if I'm not mistaken, which was symptomatic of the larger problem of the Acela Express program being scandalously botched. Now, over six years after I took this, it's still a debacle of scandalously bad engineering, management, and substandard performance, and I think that anyone who follows Amtrak (with a clear, unbiased mind) will see the immense incompetence and probably corruption that went into creating this problem. It's also been a scandalous waste of money, not because Amtrak shouldn't get buckets of money right now, but because if the money is to be spent, it should produce quality results. When I took it from Philadelphia to NYP on this particular day, however, it was a fun ride, though. :-)

I took this from Amtrak's Adirondack, as we followed Lake Champlain, and when I found this photo amongst my collection, I was struck by how weird it looks. Therefore, I uploaded it to Flickr solely for artistic merit. I hope you like it. :-)

Here's one of my favorite all-time shots on the Water Level Route, with Amtrak leading an Empire Service train out of the notorious Gulf Curve!! I've always though this was quite dramatic, even if some serious photographers consider it boring.

I took a lot of photos of Amtrak trains coming in and out of Plattsburgh when I studied there. This is one of my favorites, of an F40PH with some kind of wreck damage on the nose.

This is one of my only, and perhaps my only, good shot of an F40PH taken from above. This was a southbound, which could only be train 68, the "Adirondack" for New York Penn. It's slowing for Plattsburgh station, which is in the distance, around the curve and on the right side of the tracks.

Here's...another F40PH!! :-) This one is departing Plattsburgh, southbound with Train 68.