It helps to be at the right place at the right time. Even on the busy Philadelphia-Washington D.C. Northeast Corridor there can be long gaps between trains..
After 20 minutes or half and hour between trains, you might wonder why the line even has four tracks!
And then ever thing seems converge upon you at once.
Pat Yough and I were at Crum Lynne, Pennsylvania on the evening of January 11, 2015. We didn’t spend much time trackside before we had two running meets a few minutes apart.
Was this synchronicity? Or just luck? I don’t know. In the case of the two Amtrak trains both were running a few minutes late, so that was luck. It would have been cool to see all four pass at the same time, but unless we were phenomenally lucky, it is doubtful that such an event would have produced good photos.
Tracking the Light posts new material every morning.
Please share Tracking the Light!
The four-track pictures are really nostalgic for me. The first rail-fanning I can remember as a really little kid was standing on the NYC platform at Woodlawn on the Harlem Division. We moved away from there when I was six, so I really was a little kid. That was like standing in the middle of someone’s 1:1 train layout. The idea that a railroad would be one track, with no train for hours on end came later, and as a real let-down.