I’m not, by any stretch, a serious railfan. No vacations centered around sites to watch trains, no vest or baseball cap studded with rail-themed collectors’ pins, no log of serial numbers of cars I’ve seen, or even ridden, nor even a mileage log of my own. But I have enjoyed watching trains for as long as I can remember, and I’m told that when I was very young I’d make my parents stop the car to watch a passing train. If my son asks, in a few years, to stop and watch a train go by, I’ll happily agree.<\/p>\n
One of the bonus features, then, of living in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington DC is that the Metro tracks parallel the Amtrak tracks on the way to\u00a0Brookland<\/a>\u00a0leaving\u00a0Union Station<\/a>,\u00a0so when I’m riding the Metro to or from home I have a few minutes view of some busy rail lines.<\/p>\n One sees lots of\u00a0MARC trains<\/a>,\u00a0especially during commuter hours; they’re not so interesting. There are usually random pieces of Amtrak<\/a>\u00a0equipment in the yards, locomotives and switchers and the like. It’s a good day when I see a revenue service Amtrak train moving, especially an\u00a0Acela Express<\/a>,\u00a0or the Capitol Limited<\/a>.\u00a0Once I saw the\u00a0American Orient Express<\/a>. In the late mornings, when most of the\u00a0VRE\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0trains have arrived and are waiting for their evening departures, there’s a particularly nice view of 4 or 5 of them on different tracks but lined up: a nice illustration, I think, of the Zen View from\u00a0A Pattern Language<\/a>.<\/p>\n I of course prepare for this brief trip through the railyard, by trying to get a window seat on the appropriate side of the train: right side when going in the direction of\u00a0Glenmont<\/a>,\u00a0left side when traveling in the direction of\u00a0Shady Grove<\/a>.\u00a0In morning rush hour, it’s rare that any seat is available, but in the evening enough people get off at\u00a0Gallery Place-Chinatown<\/a>, with some more getting off at Union Station, so that there’s a reasonable of a window seat opening up. When one does, and especially if I get to see some trains, it’s a small but welcome pleasure in my day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m not, by any stretch, a serious railfan. No vacations centered around sites to watch trains, no vest or baseball cap studded with rail-themed collectors’ pins, no log of serial numbers of cars I’ve seen, or even ridden, nor even a mileage log of my own. But I have enjoyed watching trains for as long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,5,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brookland","category-dc","category-rail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}