Rusted snowy remains, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Meant to post this Friday as soon as I had the photos, but I ran out of time as I was going out with friends to see Bolt in 3-D (adorable fun movie, I highly recommend it, though you totally can skip the 3D, it doesn't really add much). Then Saturday was our library's special joint private screening of Twilight for our teens (another fun movie! They did the book justice, yay! And we had over a hundred teens come, double yay!) so I got distracted by all of that. But today's a lazy Sunday and I wanted to share my interesting experience from Friday morning.

On Thursday afternoon a CSX coal train derailed as it was zooming through Kent, Ohio, the town where I went to college. No one was injured, thankfully, but 13 cars left the tracks, spilling coal everywhere and slightly damaging the bridge they were passing under. You can read more details from the Akron Beacon Journal and the Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier--they had photographers on the scene immediately so they got really dramatic closeups of the spilled coal and etc. Well, I've never seen a train wreck before, and my inner photojournalist was screaming at me to go see what I could see and shoot what I might find interesting. Couldn't go right away, however, because Thursday night after horses I had an invitation to a jewelry party at a friend's house--friends with whom I haven't talked in years and whose new house I hadn't seen before, so I'm hardly gonna skip out on them despite the fact that a) there was a blizzard in progress and b) I'm not really a jewelry shopper. So, argh, had to wait til Friday morning to go stomping about the riverbanks. (Wouldn't have seen much in the dark anyway, though I later saw large lights on poles because, as I learned, they worked throughout the night clearing the tracks.)


This is a bulldozer shoving spilled coal out of the way in order to make room for replacement track to be laid. The Crain Ave. Bridge is in the background, with a worker walking across.

It was quite a little adventure, because the weather was fierce. Beautiful snowstorm, but it was quickly covering up all the train car wreckage, so as I photographed them I was thinking they looked more like stuff you'd find in an old junkyard, sitting neglected for years, than they looked like the results of a fresh accident. It lent a melancholiness to the scene, I guess, and also spoke about the passing of time or something, if you wanna get philosophical about it all. I just wanted to document some of it for myself. By the time I arrived they'd cleared all of the cars off the tracks and were working on laying replacement tracks.


Workers assist as a crane (yellow thing) lifts a section of new track into place.

I couldn't get closeup shots because the Crain Ave. bridge, which they'd been passing under when they messed up, was closed to traffic. So I had to content myself with shooting from the high bank above the tracks. Kent has 2 sets of train tracks going through town, one upper set on the ground level, as it were, that pulls up beside the old 1870's train station (now a restaurant) and the Williams Brothers Mill, a grain mill that still produces a lot of grain that gets shipped around the country. That's where I was. Then there is the lower set of tracks, about 15 feet down, along the Cuyahoga River, where trains pass through that are not stopping in Kent. You can get a better idea from this photo, taken from the other bridge, the Main Street Bridge, facing upstream:


The Cuyahoga River is at far left, then the lower tracks (with the headlight of a train engine visible--it had pulled in a flatbed stacked with new track sections), and then the upper tracks. There is a boxcar barely visible up there, right at the mill. They have this cool funnel to shoot grain down into a traincar, I've always meant to take photos of that sometime. But I digress...


Those lower tracks go underneath two bridges, and this illfated train of 119 cars (yoiks!) was doing just that when it derailed. Luckily the bridge was hardly damaged at all, because 15,000 cars drive over it every day, but it's still closed while they repair the damaged sewer lines underneath it, which the train smashed. And this 40-year old bridge is due to be replaced next year, so I suppose it was a good thing this wreck happened now, to the old bridge, and not to a brand-new span. Anyway, I walked all around town up and down the river, both banks, trying to get shots through all of the trees. We have a lovely wooded riveredge, with a park and trails, but right now it was in my way! :-) Oh well. What started out as a "photojournalist wanna be" trek turned into an Ansel Adams-type landscape photo shoot, as I kept getting distracted by the gorgeous snow covering everything.





Just wished the light had been better--but I can't have it both ways, can I, you either get sunshine or you get falling snow :-) Rarely both!I couldn't shoot with gloves on, however, so I had to stop far sooner than I wanted to or get frostbite. Plus my car was getting buried in snow after only a few minutes! And this is the stuff I like to do in the snow, not ski on it or sled down it, but tramp in it and shoot it....sigh...
As always, if interested you can see more photos at my Flickrstream.