very simple

This weekend Grand Central Terminal had a special event where they brought in vintage trains from around the country – some still run on special tourist trips, and some are just collectors items, but there were quite a few different classic pullman cars, from lounges, to dining cars, to sleepers. One of the women who was hosting the Wisconsin train couldn’t get over how many people remarked that the bathroom was bigger than in some NYC apartments.

Anyway, these were shot in relatively low light at a high ISO, and then I ran them through a preset vintage film filter to give what I hope is a period-appropriate skew to the images. Descriptions are in the popups when you click on the thumbnails.

One of the less typical blogs that I read with regularity is Arthur Frommer Online. Frommer, who has been writing about travel for 50 or so years, has some really good insights into the travel industry. While he does, of course, often post about travel deals and whatnot, much of the time his writing takes on a more…political…bent. He writes about how to travel cost effectively even in the era of the declining dollar. Whether you should or shouldn’t travel to various unstable parts of the world, and lately, he’s been on a tear about Amtrak.

The latest: The moment may have arrived: We may at last be on the brink of empowering Amtrak to offer a sensible method of alternative travel in the U.S.

I’ve never quite understood why we have such crappy rail service in the US, compared to Europe. Over there, I could bicycle across France secure in the knowledge that if I got tired, there was a nearby train to take me and my bike to the next town. And it was completely sensible and both time and cost effective to travel by high-speed rail from Brig, Switzerland to Paris, France. A distance that would have pretty much required flying in this country. As someone who regularly used amtrak to go between philly and nyc when I was in school, I’m very excited to see some real movement to encourage train use in this country. It’s too bad that it took getting completely screwed by the oil industry to get there.