Ok, so after reading this you all will know now that I am indeed 'touched'. I play with trains. I chase trains. I think nothing of being in some really remote place track side and just sitting .. waiting .. doing absolutely nothing. Sometimes for hours. This usually does not have anything to do with fishing as I have electronic stuff with me to aid in train watching. If you read the Hunting and Fishing portion of 'Play', you will remember that I tend to get wet when fishing. Electronic gear does not like that. Electrons slow way down in water...

I started this behavior pretty early in life. Mom needed something for me to do to keep me 'busy'. She put it together as I would get quiet when riding in the car and a train would be near. When really close I would jump up and down an point exclaiming one thing or another about it. So she got me my first wooden ( Brio ) train set. Still have that somewhere! Played with that for a few years and wanted more track, more cars ... more more more. Even in the late 50's wood train sets were expensive so she bought me plastic. Now I could have 'trains' all over the living room floor. Still have some of those somewhere also. Next, I got an American Flyer S gauge for Christmas and Dad went about mounting it on a piece of plywood so I could play with it. Geesh, he should have known that it would not stay on the plywood. I would build a layout, run trains for awhile then take it apart and build another in a different form. Don't have the American Flyer anymore as I traded it for one of those 'time and temperature' signs from American Sign and Indicator; you know - an incandescent thingie with no computer; it was all mechanical and used synchronous motors and stepper motors with wipers/contacts on different electrical plates to light bulbs and show the time and temp! My allowance was not much at that time and those American Flyer cars and track were expensive. So HO scale here we come as they were almost half the price of the American Flyer S gauge stuff. As you can expect ( Well, maybe not ) the inside railroad stuff was a precursor to the outside real railroad stuff.

So lets get to the good stuff. I have been taking pictures of trains since 1987, started in Western Washington with the ( then ) Burlington Northern Railroad. I purchased a Pentax K1000 about February 1987 and never stopped taking pix. You can read more about the camera's I have owned/used in the Photo portion of Play if you wish. I have been in 4 states, and one providence ( Wa, Or, Id, Mt and BC ) chasing trains and probably have over 1000 chemical pictures, and a growing 250ish or so digital pictures. The chemical pix I am in the process of scanning then converting to Jpeg's and making them smaller. Some of the pictures that I have scanned are in a 5 x 7 size; which uses about 28 to 30 MEG of disk space as a Tiff. I then apply some image magic on them to get them web sized; 640 x 480 and 1024 x 768 pixels and post them on my soundrail site. Use the ProtoPhoto link to view them if you wish! I have pictures of various railroads which include ( BN, AT&SF, BNSF, UP, POVA, PCC ) and others that I can't remember just now.

Here are some of my favorite shots that I have taken over the years. Some are scans, while the others are digital: either Mavica, Canon, or Pentax.