A very transit-themed weekend…
14 minute read
April 11, 2024, 11:57 PM
On March 28 and 29, I had two very distinct transit-themed adventures. One day was a bus adventure, and the other was rail-related.
The bus adventure came first, on Thursday, March 28. That one has some background to it. First of all, every year for the past several years, I have had what I call a “tax party” with my friend Matthew, where we get together and we take care of our various taxes. Generally speaking, we go somewhere to eat, and then I sit down with the computer and do my own taxes, I do Matthew’s taxes, and I do Elyse’s taxes. This year, the tax party was done in two stages, as Matthew had to cancel at the last minute due to something unforeseen coming up, so I did the taxes for Elyse and me on the original date back in February (where I owed a ton of money because of my photography earnings), and then rescheduled with Matthew for a later date, impressing on him that he really shouldn’t postpone again, since the due date for taxes is a hard date, and you really don’t want to be a last-minute filer if you can avoid it. So we planned the date, and that was that. Now Matthew is also a bit of a transit enthusiast, and has pursued some opportunities in the transit field, but has always gotten cold feet when it came to the thought of actually operating a bus.
Now, along with Elyse, I am also on the board of directors for Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, which is a bus museum based in Roanoke, Virginia. Many of us on the board are in the DC area, and some of our vehicles do stay up in the DC area for various reasons. So I pitched the idea to have a small outreach event, taking a bus out for a spin and going to visit Matthew in that. So Elyse and I went down to where the bus was kept, parked the HR-V, and took out the bus. The bus that we had was former Fairfax Connector bus 7754, a 1991 Orion I, which we tend to call MATT, which stands for “Mobile Accessible Travel Training”. As I understand it, this bus originally operated as a regular Fairfax bus, and then was converted to a training vehicle to help older adults and people with disabilities learn to use public transit. I’m not exactly sure how it all worked, but it was fitted with some extra doodads like TV monitors, and has a desk with a swivel seat in the back of it, while the area forward of the rear door has updated seats.
Continue reading…Categories: Alexandria, Driving, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Matthew, Transit, Washington DC, WMATA
Two stories about Woomy…
3 minute read
September 8, 2023, 11:33 PM
Recently, while we were driving home from shopping, Elyse asked ChatGPT to tell her a story about everyone’s favorite orange curmudgeon: Woomy. I don’t know what the exact parameters that she gave it were, but it came up with decent enough material to come up with something at least somewhat heartwarming. Check these out:
In the heart of Alexandria, Virginia, there lived a curmudgeonly orange octopus named Woomy. Every day, rain or shine, Woomy would climb aboard the DASH bus, his tentacles a tangle of frustration. He’d grumble and grouse about the noise, the crowds, and the whole human world around him.
Passengers would stare, amused by this unexpected commuter. Woomy’s sour expression became a familiar sight, and people began sharing stories of his antics. But despite the attention, Woomy remained steadfast in his curmudgeonly ways.
One winter’s day, as snow painted the city white, a young child with curious eyes got on the bus. Ignoring the stares, the child approached Woomy, offering a small, hand-knit scarf. Woomy’s eyes widened, his expression softening just a bit. He accepted the scarf with a tentative tentacle.
Categories: Alexandria, Artificial intelligence, DASH, Woomy
Remembering that your phone’s camera is still ultimately a phone camera…
6 minute read
February 20, 2023, 12:21 PM
Recently, I was reminded that my phone camera will only get me so far. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great camera, with all sorts of functionality built in that creates some downright stunning shots. But it is still ultimately just a phone camera. When I really need to go the distance, my real camera, a Nikon D5300 DSLR, will do that. I got this reminder during two visits to the Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia, when I photographed the Wilkes Street Tunnel on November 23, 2022, and on a return visit on February 15, 2023.
The first visit, which was part of a much larger adventure with Elyse, as well as our friends Aaron and Evan Stone, was one that I was somewhat unprepared for. I had known about the tunnel for a while, and it had a place on my “photo shoot ideas” list (which I jokingly refer to as “the place where photo ideas go to die” considering how many things I add to it, but how little I cross things off of it), but visiting it was not part of the plan. I didn’t necessarily plan for the day to be a big photography day, but I had made allowances for it nonetheless. I brought my DSLR along, but I didn’t really intend to do much with it, and certainly didn’t bring the tripod along. When we ended up at the Wilkes Street Tunnel, more or less by chance, I was kicking myself for not having brought the tripod along. So I just used my phone, and shot it with handheld phone shots. The results were okay, but not great. Specifically, I didn’t like the way that the lighting along the ceiling looked in my shots, with lens flares around the lights. Other than that, the shots were fine. Besides the lights, my biggest annoyance was that it was early evening, and people were frequently moving through the tunnel and getting in the way of my shots. My rule is that you don’t disturb people using a facility as it is intended while you’re photographing. You wait for them to pass and then continue, and if they stop for you, you wave them through. The idea is that you can’t get too upset about them, because they’re using the tunnel for what it was intended for, so you just have to work around them.
Categories: Alexandria, Cameras
A fun and memorable day…
24 minute read
February 8, 2023, 9:00 AM
Today marks twenty years since I made one of my favorite early DC adventures. On that day, February 8, 2003, I drove up from Harrisonburg and headed up to the DC area on a Saturday for a day of fun, photographing the area in the snow and checking out parts of the Metro system that I’d never been to before. It was my senior year of college, and was one of three trips to DC that I made from my dorm that year. I also feel like I shot a number of my “classic” DC area photos on this trip, since a lot of photos from this trip have made their way all over the Internet (i.e. you’ve probably seen some of them in the wild, and never realized that they were my work).
This trip had an interesting set of circumstances that led up to it, though. As I recall, snow had been predicted for Thursday night and Friday morning. That prediction ultimately came to pass, as it snowed enough to cancel classes for Friday. This was not unanticipated, so, the night before, as part of my duties as a resident advisor in Potomac Hall, I had posted signs on my floor advising people to check the JMU website for information on class status. In other words, make sure that you have to go out before you go out, because you might not have to go out if the university cancels classes. The sign was posted with the intent of putting the responsibility for checking the status onto my residents, so that I would not have to get up early to check the status and post signs to that effect, since I didn’t have classes until later in the day, and would not wake up before the first classes of the day would have started. So with the signs posted, I went to bed. Good. Now fast forward to around 6 AM or so. I vaguely remembered hearing the phone ring a few times while I was trying to sleep, but I never answered it, because I was trying to sleep. Then I’m awakened by a very loud banging on my door. Having just been rudely awakened like that, my first response was to shout, “WHAT?!?” It was Mecca Marsh, our hall director, i.e. the boss, so it must be important. I went to get up, and in my haste in getting up, I lost my balance and fell back onto my bed, landing on my left elbow. When I landed, I heard a series of four or five popping sounds, and I remember thinking, “That can’t be good.” Apparently, that popping had come from something in my left shoulder, and it now hurt very much.
So what was the big, important reason that Mecca came up and woke me up out of a dead sleep? Make a sign and put it on the outside door stating that classes were cancelled. Believe me, she was lucky that my arm was sore from the injury that I had just suffered, because I probably would have hit her otherwise. I was absolutely seeing red following all of that. For the amount of effort that she went to, making multiple phone calls and then coming up to my floor and waking me up, just to order me to make a single sign, she could have done it herself. And when I mentioned that I had just injured my shoulder in the process of getting up, and that it now hurt very much, she responded with a dismissive, “You’ll be fine.” Yeah, way to show some compassion after an injury that you played a part in causing. I expected no less from Mecca, though, because she had her favorites on the staff and I was not one of them, and therefore I was treated accordingly. In any case, I made the sign, and tried to go back to sleep, but I was now pretty mad about what had just happened, plus I was in a good bit of pain. You understand why I consider Mecca Marsh to be one of the worst bosses that I’ve ever had. I probably should have seen a doctor on a worker’s comp claim, and I also can’t imagine that the management would have taken too kindly to the whole situation had I reported it like I probably should have, and it wouldn’t have reflected well on Mecca considering that she precipitated the whole thing. She would have hated that, considering how big she was on propping up her own image (she had some major inadequacy issues of her own). But I was only 21 and didn’t know any better, so I just suffered through it.
Categories: Alexandria, Arlington, DC trips, JMU, Northern Virginia, Personal health, Washington DC
You’re taking me for a ride…
11 minute read
December 23, 2022, 12:57 PM
On Friday, November 18, Elyse and I went out to Ashburn for a ride on the new Silver Line extension. This was the conclusion of a long-awaited public works project, bringing the Metro Silver Line out to its intended western terminus in Ashburn, Virginia. You may recall that I did a similar adventure with my friend Matthew on the Silver Line when it opened in 2014. I couldn’t attend the opening day events because I had to work, but Elyse did. She managed to get a ticket to the VIP event by asking nicely, much like I did in 2014, and she had a blast. She got to meet Metro General Manager Randy Clarke, and even got to sound the horn on a 7000-Series railcar.
For this adventure, our day started out with an open house event at the Dulles rail yard, which guided our plans to an extent. Driving over, we listened to “Escapee” by Architecture in Helsinki, which Metro had used for a promotional video for the opening of the first part of the Silver Line. For the first ride on the extension, that seemed fitting. At Dulles yard, we got a tour of the new facility and had a catered lunch. The new facility was quite nice, and we both commented that it looked more like a community college building than a train depot. Lunch was from Panera, we got Silver Line t-shirts, I got my Silver Line pennant to go with the one from 2014, and we also got a special Silver Line cookie:
Categories: Airplanes, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, WMATA
An afternoon looking at Legos…
6 minute read
August 21, 2022, 7:06 PM
On August 6, Elyse and I headed out to Chantilly for BrickFair, which is a Lego show held at the Dulles Expo Center. This was my second time going to BrickFair, following my previous visit in 2018. Like in 2018, I had fun, and I photographed a lot of Lego creations with my phone, while Elyse checked out all of the vendors. I am always impressed with what I see at these events, because it puts whatever Lego creations that I made back in the day to shame. My stuff was decent, and I always took pride in the way that I engineered things to work with the parts that I had available, but this stuff is worlds beyond anything that I ever did.
There was so much to see here, and while I got around to all of the tables, I definitely didn’t see everything there, because there was just that much to see, and we had only budgeted four hours. Here are some of the highlights of what I saw:
The Chicago Theatre.
Categories: Events, Fairfax County, Ships
Saying goodbye to the Orion V…
9 minute read
July 5, 2022, 11:15 AM
On Friday, July 1, Elyse and I went on a transit adventure, going down to Alexandria to attend the ceremonial final trip of the DASH Orion buses. For those not familiar, DASH is one of the local transit agencies in the DC region, serving Alexandria, Virginia alongside Metrobus. The Orion V is a model of high-floor transit bus manufactured by Orion Bus Industries from 1989 to 2009. Orion itself went out of business in 2013 when parent company Daimler mostly exited the bus market in North America (save for selling Setra motorcoaches), and New Flyer, another bus manufacturer, bought Orion’s aftermarket parts business. Long story short, Orion has been gone for a while, and even the newest high-floor buses are now reaching retirement age. DASH, meanwhile, had been operating Orion buses since its founding in 1984, initially operating the Orion I model, and later the Orion V. So this event marked the close of an era in DASH’s history, as these were their last Orion buses in service. DASH’s fleet now consists mostly of Gillig and New Flyer vehicles. DASH was also the last agency in the region that still operated the Orion V in service, which closes a chapter in the DC region in general as well. Metro and Fairfax Connector still operate the later Orion VII model in revenue service, but that is a low-floor bus, and is a very different design than the Orion V.
As far as the Orion V itself goes, that is a pretty solid bus. Most agencies in the area operated them at some point or other. I’ve photographed Orion Vs operated by Metro, Ride On, DASH, and Fairfax Connector. I’ve operated Orion Vs plenty of times, and they’re a lot of fun once you get the hang of them. I found them to be very difficult to handle as a new operator in a training environment because they were a bit bouncier than the low-floor buses, as well as more sensitive in the steering, but once I was out of training and operating on my own, I was able to get the hang of driving them, and had tons of fun with them, to the point where I looked forward to being assigned one. If the number started with a “21”, I was a happy guy. I especially liked to take them on runs that had big deadheading (running without passengers) segments – especially on the freeway. I remember doing a run a few times where the last revenue trip ended up at Prince George’s Plaza station, and I had to deadhead from there all the way back to Rockville, where the bus division was located. I would take East-West Highway (MD 410) over to Baltimore Avenue (US 1), and then take that up to the Beltway. Taking an Orion V on the Beltway late at night was a lot of fun. I just had to remember to limit my enjoyment to about 60 mph in order to keep myself out of trouble. After all, our buses had DriveCams on them, and those puppies were sensitive. I was delighted when I got to take an Orion V out for a spin again in 2018 when a friend who helped run a bus museum was visiting. I got settled in that seat, and it felt like old times again, after I had not operated an Orion V in a little more than two years at that point – ever since I left the bus in order to do trains. I took my friend, along with Elyse, on a proper adventure in that bus, going over a few routes from my time as a bus operator, and showing it off a little bit. A good time was definitely had by all.
Categories: Alexandria, DASH
Shooting macro with a new phone…
5 minute read
March 5, 2022, 6:10 PM
At the end of February, I got myself a new phone: a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. This is the latest and the greatest as far as Samsung phones go, as of the time of this writing. I typically get a top-of-the-line phone for myself, mostly because of how much I use it for photography. I also like a big phone screen, especially now that I am in middle age, and have to hold things further away from my face in order to read them clearly. This new phone was a bit of an update compared to my last phone, the Galaxy S20 Ultra. It still looks and acts like a Samsung phone, so there was very little learning curve, but it’s faster, easier to read, has a better camera, and has the S-Pen (which I had not had since 2017, back when I had a Note 5). Most importantly, though, the camera is much better than the S20. The S20 Ultra’s camera was a bit farsighted. It did just fine photographing things that were far away, but it couldn’t focus if you got really close to it (sounds like me!). So in order to get the proper effect, you had to back up and then zoom in. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough. Sounds like when I need a magnifying glass in order to read the fine print sometimes.
So with the new phone in hand, Elyse and I went out, and I took it for a spin while running some errands. I was interested in trying out the improved macro function, and focused on shooting things really close up. We got together with my friend Matthew, and he got to see me do my thing, getting up, on, over, and around everything while Elyse did the things that she needed to do.
Our first stop was Fair Oaks Mall, where Elyse wanted to go to BoxLunch, which is a gift shop. I had assumed that BoxLunch was a restaurant, i.e. a place where you can buy a boxed lunch (imagine my surprise to find out that they didn’t sell food!). While Elyse was going around there, Matthew and I waited outside, where I took the new phone camera through its paces in the mall, focusing on the details in the sitting area just outside of BoxLunch:
Categories: Cameras, Cell phone, Fairfax County, Gaithersburg
My first true railfan trip…
8 minute read
August 22, 2021, 10:14 AM
I recently came to the realization that it has been a little more than twenty years since my first true railfan trip on the DC Metro system, on July 28, 2001. Mind you, I had ridden the system plenty of times before that, and I had photographed the system a few times prior to this, but this was my first time going in with the rail system itself as the destination, rather than as the means to an end. I explored around in DC and Virginia, photographing stations, making recordings of the door chimes, and exploring new areas of the system that I had never been to before. Back then, there was no Silver Line, the trains were still orange and ran in four and six-car consists, and they stopped in the center of the platforms rather than at the end like they do today. I was using my original Mavica for the photos, which saved photos at 640×480 resolution onto 3½” floppy disks. To record the door chimes, I used a boombox-style tape recorder and recorded it to a cassette.
As I recall, I started at Vienna, stopped off at Virginia Square, went down to L’Enfant Plaza, took the Yellow Line over the bridge to Virginia, got out at Pentagon, checked out the bus bays at Pentagon, briefly took an escalator up into the Pentagon from the station (and then turned around because I didn’t want to visit the Pentagon), went to Pentagon City, visited Pentagon City Mall, then headed to National Airport and Franconia-Springfield. I stopped at Arlington Cemetery station, and then headed towards Vienna, stopping at East Falls Church and West Falls Church along the way. Then I got back in the car and headed down to Woodbridge to visit Potomac Mills, where I was trying to get a new optical drive for my computer. I didn’t find anything at Potomac Mills, but I did remember an optical drive that I had passed up earlier at the Babbage’s store at Pentagon City. So after leaving Potomac Mills, I drove over to Franconia-Springfield and got back on the Metro, riding back up to Pentagon City and buying that optical drive. I then stopped at Crystal City and King Street stations on the way back to Franconia-Springfield.
I had a number of firsts on that trip. I rode between Pentagon City and Franconia-Springfield for the first time, and logged my first visits to Franconia-Springfield, King Street, Crystal City, Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery, Virginia Square, East Falls Church, and West Falls Church. I consider that a pretty good amount of new territory covered.
Categories: Northern Virginia, Washington DC, WMATA
When your drone starts to act up…
5 minute read
June 7, 2021, 11:20 AM
On Tuesday, June 1, Elyse and I went on a little adventure in Prince William County, Virginia, where the goal for me was to photograph some old AT&T Long Lines infrastructure up close with the drone. First of all, for those not familiar, AT&T Long Lines is a now-defunct system from the mid-20th century used for telecommunications via microwave transmission. It has long since been replaced by more modern systems, but many of the towers still remain. Some have been converted to cell phone towers, with varying amounts of the old Long Lines infrastructure abandoned in place. I’ve photographed about six of these things in varying degrees of detail, mostly in Virginia, both ground-based and with a drone.
On this particular day, I had two towers in my sights: one near Dumfries, and one near Manassas. The Dumfries one was directly off of Route 234, and the Manassas one was a little bit further off of the beaten path. The Dumfries tower was in full form, with its horn antennas still attached, while the Manassas tower had lost the old horn antennas.
Here are some of my photos of the Dumfries tower:
Categories: Cameras, Northern Virginia
Going behind the pylons…
4 minute read
November 19, 2020, 11:31 AM
Back on November 6, Elyse and I took the drone out for a spin again, and I did some photography. This time, we went out to Leesburg, and took a late afternoon golden-hour flight around a familiar landmark: the former Walmart off of Route 15. This is a typical 1990s-era pylon-style store, and it closed in May 2019 when a new Supercenter opened elsewhere in the Leesburg area. Because of the proximity of the location to Leesburg airport, I had to notify the airport of our activity using their online form, and then, whirlybirds away. I flew up and around the building, and even investigated the roof a little bit.
A pre-flight capture, with the HR-V at right.
Categories: Loudoun County, Photography, Walmart
Stack ’em up?
7 minute read
April 1, 2020, 1:25 AM
So my latest experiments with photography have been with stacking exposures. For those not familiar, the general idea behind stacked exposures is to take several short exposures instead of one long exposure, and then “stack” them on top of each other in order to simulate a photo with a longer exposure. It is useful in situations where a true long exposure is impractical, such as when shooting in daylight. The way it’s done is that you take all of the shots that you intend to stack out in the field, preferably using a tripod and a remote control for the shutter, and then do the stacking at home.
Whenever I test a new technique, I typically will shoot photos of something that I’ve photographed before. This way, I already know what the photo is supposed to look like, and I know what works as far as angles go. That eliminates a few variables so that I can just focus on the technique. In this case, I did two field trips. One was out to Point of Rocks and along Route 7 in Virginia and ultimately into DC, and the other was to Burnt Mills Dam off of US 29 in Montgomery County. The Virginia trip was mostly for nighttime shots, and the Burnt Mills trip was for daytime shots.
At Point of Rocks, Elyse went trainspotting at the nearby MARC station while I wandered around with my tripod to photograph some stuff. My focus was on the Point of Rocks Bridge and the Potomac River running under the bridge. My focus was mainly on smoothing out the water.
Categories: Frederick County, Loudoun County, Montgomery County, Photography, Washington DC
The signs of social distance…
7 minute read
March 28, 2020, 12:40 AM
In the era of social distancing brought on by the novel coronavirus, I have definitely observed some changes in how the world looks. As a person who works in an essential industry (people still have to go places, yo), I still get out quite a bit. In my work, service levels have been reduced, and all trains are now eight cars in order to allow people to space themselves out, plus it’s strange to go through some stations in the middle of the day and pick up nobody. It’s also strange seeing the message boards on the Beltway advising people in big letters to stay home. It’s also strange to see so many people wearing gloves and surgical masks, even though those don’t do anything when the general public wears them as a preventative measure, and may actually be harmful if the person wearing them thinks that it excuses them from things like not touching their face, washing their hands, and so on.
In any case, most of the time when I’m going out, it’s to pick up a few things at stores, mostly on my days off of work. The first thing that I noticed was the panic buying, as seen on March 14 at the Target in Rockville:
The toilet paper aisle, picked completely bare.
Categories: COVID-19, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Montgomery County, News
These photos could have been taken anywhere…
4 minute read
February 28, 2020, 8:30 AM
While on an outing on Thursday, I stopped to photograph the former Walmart store in Leesburg, Virginia. I had been planning a photo shoot here ever since the store closed in May 2019, upon the opening of a new Supercenter store elsewhere in the Leesburg area. I was drawn to this location because, unlike a lot of former Walmart stores, this one left a massive labelscar on the building due to repaintings over the years, as revealed in photos taken by Aaron Stone. Other Walmarts that closed have had lesser labelscars, and Walmart has also been known to paint out their labelscars. But this one had “WAL★MART” still easily readable in blue. I felt something of a sense of urgency in getting down to this location, because who knows how long a former Walmart will sit idle. Other former Walmart stores in the DC area have been scooped up relatively quickly, such as the former Manassas Walmart, which was quickly converted to other uses. So who knew how long this might remain in this form.
Arriving on site, I couldn’t have gotten better shooting conditions. The skies were partly cloudy, with only a small amount of cloud cover, which worked to my benefit. Completely clear skies make for slightly bluish photos that need to be color corrected in post-production, while partly cloudy skies tend to lend to more accurate colors that require less work at the computer. My only complaint about the conditions was that it was cold and windy, which was not fun to shoot in. By the time I finished this shoot, which took about 25 minutes to do, I was quite cold. It took me some time to warm back up once I got back in the car.
Categories: Loudoun County, Walmart
The sounds of Metro…
2 minute read
January 18, 2020, 10:37 AM
Back on July 8, 2007, my friend Matthew and I went on a railfan adventure with a different purpose than we would usually do. Normally, a railfan adventure involved lots of photos and videos. This time, instead of a camera, we brought a laptop and a microphone. The goal was to get some audio recordings of the trains from the interior, for use in BVE, which is a train simulator program for Windows. We worked from the double-ended seats, which were located more or less directly over the wheel trucks and traction motors. I worked the laptop while wearing headphones, while Matthew held up the mic. I’ve never been a big train simulator enthusiast (I prefer watching the real thing vs. operating a simulator), so I don’t know if these recordings ever got used in any of the final versions of these trains, but I loved doing the field work for these sorts of community-built projects. I also did a set of Red Line announcements for the simulator. As I know, there has never been a commercially available train simulator for the DC Metro, so for that, I enjoyed contributing in a small way to what was the only WMATA train simulator out there.
Our adventure that day took us on the Red, Orange, and Blue Lines, and we got recordings of cars 3273 (Breda original), 3185 (Breda rehab), 5028 (CAF), and 1130 (Rohr).
Original Breda car 3273 from Forest Glen to Silver Spring
Categories: Arlington, Matthew, Silver Spring, Washington DC, WMATA