"Sunning in Secaucus," August 2009

Sunning in Secaucus

Waiting for his train home, this guy took a moment to absorb the sunshine.

Day 304 of 365

Life at the Depot

A mural on the platform of Track 2 at the Secaucus Junction station.

Day 226 of 365

Friday afternoon in the universe

Quite the light on all the iron as we pull into the terminal.

Day 225 of 365

Lower-level view

This week, I had my first chance to take a double-decker from Clifton to Hoboken. The first day, I sat on the upper level. Second day, lower, which got me this perspective in Secaucus.

Day 215 of 365

Waiting in Hoboken

Meryl Streep nowhere to be found, however.

Day 202 of 365

After the fire

Friday, as we're on the way to Cleveland, I get a text alert from NJ Transit saying the Clifton station is closed indefinitely because of a significant fire. The SMS cut off before I received the part about how train service would be unaffected, but until I found that info, we panicked a little. We also pictured the station as a pile of rubble, but it's not. It's this -- a hole in the roof covered by a blue tarp.

Day 196 of 365

Arriving in Hoboken

After four hours' sleep and about six hours spent painting the house, I barely had enough time to clean up and get to the train -- on which I slept for half an hour. Still waking up as we disembarked at Hoboken, I took a picture as I walked up the aisle. Then I put my camera away for the day and headed into work in a trance.

Day 167 of 365

Good morning, America, how are you?

They used to name PATH cars after New Jersey towns, but those are few and far between now as they add new cars.

Day 160 of 365

Tracks over 10th Ave.

[I still haven't caught up on blogging my daily photos since coming back from vacation, but they're all in the Flickr set. I'll catch up soon enough, but I just couldn't wait until I had to post this one.]

[The backlog is released and 18 days of photos have been posted, beginning with Day 142. Start there and head back here!]

Ever since I first read about the decommissioned railroad tracks built over 10th Avenue and the West Side, I've been intrigued. And once they announced that the old trestle would become the High Line Park, I've eagerly anticipated my first trip up there.

This one particular overpass has caught my eye since 2006, when I first started working in Chelsea Market. I'm standing on the east side of 10th Avenue, just north of the Market, looking west across the avenue to where the tracks used to duck into the building before emerging out the north side and continuing up to 34th St.

Many of the old entryways have been built over, like the one in this photo, so it's only bits and pieces of the rail line's past that remain. The rest is left to the imagination.

Day 78 of 365

Eeee

Beneath the city at Penn Station.

Day 54 of 365

Train at the end of the day

Went to pick up Casey and realized I hadn't taken a photo today, what with doing my taxes and scanning in old negatives. So, voila.

"Canadian National Railways No. 47," Pennsylvania, June 2007

Canadian National Railways No. 47

Between lunch with a friend on afternoon and a ballgame that evening in Scranton, I spent some time at Steamtown National Historic Site, a collection of retired trains on the tracks of a former maintenance yard and turntable.

Day 26 of 365

Rush hour at Hoboken

Each night on my way to work, I pass through the Hoboken train station going against the grain of commuters spewing from the PATH tunnels and rushing to catch their above-ground trains to points west in New Jersey. (The Hobokenites stroll out into the streets through a different exit, so I don't have the pleasure of dodging them.) Tonight, I took just a few moments to pause for a couple of pictures, but if I allow myself some more time, I know I can improve upon where I stand and the composition of these two shots. And therein lies another benefit to this photo-a-day project: For those images I have in my head to take, or those I see in my daily travels, I can experiment with different angles and views and discover new ways of looking at the subjects until I get it just right.

Day 12 of 365

Stuck on the train

Spent 2 1/2 hours on trains getting to work tonight -- a trip that usually takes one hour, door-to-door. Switches on the tracks that move trains from one set of rails to another froze outside Secaucus, delaying us indefinitely somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. I managed to get a lot done -- I napped, I read The New Yorker, I tried to get a few photographs. None of them proved to be keepers, except for this one, settling though it may be.

Day 11 of 365

Industrial Clifton, from the train

Shot this from the moving train between Clifton and Passaic. Was just playing around (and taking a picture of this poster) and got lucky with it. That's what happens with digital -- you can experiment and simply delete the throwaways, rather than wasting a frame of film and not knowing the result until you've paid for developing.

Day 5 of 365

Ticket to ride

Like many of my countrymen and women, I was back on the train today, returning to the office after a two-week break. My ride into New York (via Hoboken) was at 5 p.m., though, so I got to ease into it after a full day of running errands and tying up some things around the house. Except for the Christmas lights. Most of those remain on the arches and posts of the front porch and over the arch over the gate leading to the back patio. If the rain holds off tomorrow, I'll get to those. Maybe.

"Waiting in Hoboken," New Jersey, July 2008

Hoboken waiting room

I would have loved to used any number of signs for a shoppe, grille or other such establishment that harkens to days of olde with the extraneous "E" in its name. But I found this shot of the waiting room at the Hoboken train terminal first and felt it fit the bill.

From the days of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad to today's New Jersey Transit and PATH commuters, the station at Hoboken has served bustling New Jerseyans on their way to and from New York and to the far reaches of the Garden State. With the original and ornate Penn Station now sunk in the swamps of Jersey, going through Hoboken makes for a much more aesthetically pleasing trip each afternoon.

"PATH view," New Jersey, August 2008

PATH view

On a hot August afternoon, I slumped down in a seat on the PATH train at the Hoboken station, awaiting the ride into New York for work. Drained, I was so exhausted I didn't bother pulling out my magazine to read. After taking a gulp of water, I looked up to see this view in front of me and was glad I had my point-and-shoot with me.

"Waiting, Clifton Station," February 2008

Waiting, Clifton Station

Winter really hit us last week. We'd had a few snowfalls here and there, two or three days where I had to get out the shovel and clear the sidewalks, but our first storm of the season came on Friday. Four or five inches covered the ground by the time we left for work at 8 a.m. and we walked down the middle of our street because the inch or two that had fallen since the plow came through made it easier to walk than trudging along the untouched sidewalks. Trains were running a little behind schedule, but we settled into a seat and watched the blanketed landscape as we passed through the towns and crossed the Meadowlands. On the bridge over the marshes, the clouds obscured everything to the north, so that looking out over the water we saw nothing beyond a few hundred feet -- no sports complex, no Harmon Meadow office complex and condo tower, no highways. It could have been the open ocean out there in the mist.

Chicago stories: Riding the El

Doors open on the right at Randolph & Wabash

"Let's say you're in Chicago and you're rattling along on the El" -- Rhett Miller

We rattled along on the El all weekend. No need to rent a car in this city. This is the Randolph & Wabash station in the Loop, the stop where Sandra Bullock's Lucy worked in a token booth and saved Peter Gallagher's Peter when he fell onto the tracks. But that's not why we went there. We had been in Millennium Park and this was the closest station.

Anyway, our trip began with the hour-long rattling ride from O'Hare to downtown on a Friday morning, just as Lollapalooza was getting under way. Just after we passed a treatment plant of some kind -- probably water, but maybe I thought it was sewage at the time -- and two high school stoners got on the train, I remarked to Casey, "I think I smell the sewage plant." Two stops later, Casey corrected me: "I don't think it was the sewage plant you smelled." Stoner 1 and Stoner 2 didn't spend much time focusing on their feet, though they were sure to hydrate themselves before a day in the sun at Grant Park, stuffing bottled water into the pockets of their oversized shorts.

But the best part, and the reason I'm recalling them here, is their inability to learn from their mistakes. Seriously, kids, behavioral history is filled with accounts of even the simplest animals learning from unpleasant experiences so that they do not repeat the actions that illicit those painful reactions. Not these boys.

The car we were on had different doors from what you'd expect on a subway. Instead of two panels that slide to either side, they had four-paneled doors that opened in a bi-fold fashion, much like you might find on a closet in your house. They fold in, so that if you are standing within about a foot of the door, you're going to get hit by it.

Guess where Stoner 1 and Stoner 2 insisted on standing. They spent the whole trip within bi-fold distance, with one of the two in particular getting whacked repeatedly. Yet as exasperated as he got, he never made an attempt to stand closer to the interior of the train.

When we finally reached our stop at Clark and Lake, they were standing in front of the door that was about to open. With our suitcases -- and the ridiculously short time the doors stay open on the Chicago MTA system -- I wanted to ensure we got off the train quickly, so I asked them to move as we pulled into the station, saving him another bruise.

But I'm sure he got whacked again before getting out.