Tehachapi Trip 9
April 23-26, 2003
Click on a thumbnail at left to view the image here.
Well, well, well. Three holes in the ground. My first serious traingeek visit to Tehachapi Pass in almost two years.
The weather was hazy and variable, and the trains stayed away in droves. The sun gets up too late in April to make much of the early morning rush and after those, work windows keep the trains scarce until the end of the day, just in time for the sun to go down. While I'm grumbling, somebody needs to buy UP some loco cleaning equipment and what happened to all those hard working SP locos? The days of manned helper operations seem to be largely over, and those Dash 9s and SD70Ms are everywhere, so things have changed a lot here in the past few years.
On the bright side, the wildflowers were in abundance, adding a blaze of color to some hillsides, that unfortunately, isn't as impressive on camera despite some PS tweaking. Actually, all these shots looks a little lifeless on the web, so I guess I have some more playing to do there...
Thankfully, sun and trains came together on a magic Saturday afternoon to wrap things up. I guess that's why I keep coming back. Oh, and I rented a nice 300mm 2.8 IS lens for the trip. Here are some of the shots I took over those days.
All images by Darryl K Bond, taken on a Canon EOS 1Ds. Feel free to use for non-profit purposes provided you credit the photographer, provide a link to here and let me know!
Click on the thumbnail for the full size image. All are approx 3-600 kb jpeg files.