Rail joint on a maintenance-of-way spur just north of Palo Alto.

Shot with the Nikon D70s and the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom at 60mm, ISO 400, f/4.5, shutter 1/125 sec. Exposure, contrast, levels, and highlights adjustments in Aperture.

View across the street through the University Avenue underpass, beneath the tracks at the Palo Alto station.

Shot with the Nikon D70s and the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom at 46mm, ISO 1600, f/4.5, shutter 1/13 sec. Exposure, contrast, saturation and highlights adjustments in Aperture.

Sunset rainbow in Death Valley, California.

Taken in April, 1998 with a Minolta XG-M and the 50mm f1.7 lens on Ektrachrome 100, scanned on a Polaroid SprintScan 35+, then cleaned up and cropped in Photoshop CS4, with contrast, levels, highlights and color adjustments in Aperture.

Caboose at the end of a work train parked on the Redwood City Harbor industrial lead. Mainline trains rarely use cabooses any more, but I guess the crew doing track repair needs an office.

Shot with the Nikon D70s and the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom at 52mm, ISO 400, f/8, shutter 1/800 sec. White balance, exposure, levels and highlights adjustments in Aperture.

Another scary missile from the White Sands Missile Range museum, New Mexico.

Shot with the Nikon D70s and the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom at 46mm, ISO 400, f/9, shutter 1/800 sec. White balance, exposure, contrast, saturation, levels and highlights adjustments in Aperture.

Dubious trackwork on an industrial lead in Sunnyvale. At first glance, one might take this section for abandoned, but the shiny rails say otherwise, and deeper into the maze of track you’ll find obviously new tank cars spotted on a factory spur. Federal Railroad Administration regulations limit speed in such areas to 10 MPH, which in this case would seem recklessly fast.

Shot with the Nikon D70s and the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom at 70mm, ISO 400, f/11, shutter 1/500 sec. Exposure, contrast, saturation, levels, and highlights adjustments in Aperture.

View up the maintenance ladder of signal bridge at CP Hendy, Sunnyvale, California.

Shot with the Nikon D70s and the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom at 18mm, ISO 400, f/9, shutter 1/1000 sec. Exposure, contrast, saturation, and highlights adjustments in Aperture.

Northbound Caltrain glimpsed through trackside fences at Fair Oaks Avenue, Sunnyvale.

Shot with the Nikon D70s and the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom at 70mm, ISO 400, f/7.1, shutter 1/200 sec. Exposure, contrast, levels, and highlights adjustments in Aperture.

Graffiti covered work gondola, parked on a siding at Redwood Junction, Redwood City, California.

Shot with the Nikon D70s and the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom at 70mm, ISO 400, f/9, shutter 1/1000 sec. Exposure and highlights adjustments in Aperture.

This steel through-truss bridge, built in 1902, carries the tracks across San Francisquito Creek between Palo Alto and Menlo Park. It’s one of my favorite railroad structures on the peninsula, but at age 108 it’s a wonder the thing still stands, and its days are almost certainly numbered. No doubt it will be replaced with some modern ferroconcrete thing that will be stronger, safer, vastly cheaper to maintain, and utterly lacking in character.

Actually, I have a suspicion that the main thing keeping it out of the scrap yard is the uncertainty surrounding the California High-Speed Rail Project, whose gaspingly astronomical price tag, city wrecking right-of-way appetite, and passenger traffic projections drawn up by Hollywood accountants have turned it into the biggest public works football since the California Water Project (the latter being the vast system of dams, reservoirs, and aqueduct plumbing whereby Northern California bribes Southern California with water to keep the Angelenos down there thankyouverymuch). The current high-speed rail plans propose to run the line under the creek with a tunnel, but the future of the whole project grows murkier as each time the plans get more specific, new environmental impacts are revealed to disgruntle the liberal peninsula residents who originally supported the thing but who never stopped to think that it meant bulldozing new right-of-way through their cities and then running trains on it. As long as the fate of these grand plans remains unclear, I’m betting Caltrain won’t make any long-term plans for what to do with this bridge.

Shot with the Nikon D70s and the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom at 70mm, ISO 400, f/4.5, shutter 1/80 sec. Exposure, contrast, saturation, and levels adjustments in Aperture.