Travelogue
I hopped on a bus to Carkeek Park this afternoon. It’s basically a chunk of forest with streams, and it ends up at the beach, which is accessible only via a pedestrian overpass. I stood on the overpass to take in the scene for ten minutes or so. There was a great blue heron standing in the water, and a bald eagle flew up to perch in a tall cedar. Then, the cherry on the cake, I heard a train approaching from the south, so I got to watch it chug around the curve at the far end of Golden Gardens and then come thundering along and under the overpass. It gave a little blast on the horn as it approached, either for safety reasons or to say hello.
The heron left the scene though.
This one is traveling north to south; the one I saw was going south to north. A two-engine freight train though, not the commuter train.
Lovely! It reminds me a bit of Riverbank State Park in NYC: woods, train, ocean, birds, beach.
It is a really excellent park – most of it wild, because of very steep slopes; lots of wildlife; then that crash-bang finale when you arrive at the beach.
Nice!
I lived near here briefly many years ago, my first experience of living abroad. I still come back to look around (via microsoft flight simulator) and flew up the stretch of railroad from Seattle to Mukilteo just yesterday. Looked like a beautiful day, too
It was. The trail going downhill into the park was in shadow, because the winter sun is so low in the sky, but the sun was lighting up the trees at the top of the east side of the trail like a stage set.
*adds to places to see next time I’m out there.
Well first let me send you the full list of epic parks on Puget Sound along with the other list of epic parks on Lake Washington. I hate to tell you but there’s not a single dud among them.
You always have such adventures!
My first visit was way too short, Fer sherr.
Are those the tracks that Amtrak uses?
The train seems to be approaching the camera, in other words on the left-hand track. Is that usual? In the UK and Ireland trains travel on the left (as you’d expect) and also in France (as you wouldn’t expect), but in most of Europe they keep right. When we took the train from Marseilles to Frankfurt a few years ago we wondered how they’d manage the switch at the German border: simple, we went into Strasbourg on the left and came out in the opposite direction, thus on the right.
Spain too. I think it’s because the Brits built their system, or at least they learned from the Brits.
WaM @ 10, yes. They’re the everything tracks. Mostly it’s Burlington Northern moving freight but it’s Amtrak too and the Sounder commuter train that goes to and from Everett. I live very near them, and hear the 3- 4- 5-locomotive trains thundering past late at night.
Athel @ 11 – Interesting question. The train I saw yesterday (this photo isn’t that) was on the same track, going in the other direction, so I guess no.
I was going to say I’ve been on those tracks, on my way to Vancouver, but then I remembered I caught the train in or around Everett, so I guess not. (And on the way back, I wasn’t paying attention and reserved a seat on the Amtrak bus, and we ended up spending about three hours waiting to pass through customs.)
Argh.
There’s only one mainline track there. The other one is a siding. That’s the standard configuration out here, and it leads to looooong delays for the passenger trains, which must give priority to the freights (because BNSF owns the rails), unlike in Europe where there is generally a mainline rail in both directions. Many is the long hour I’ve sat in an Amtrak car on a siding somewhere north of Seattle, waiting for a freight train to pass by. It gets a little better south of Everett because the Sounder light rail goes all the way up there, but between Everett and Vancouver it’s delay after delay. One of Obama’s promised improvements was to fund high speed rail out here, which would necessitate new tracks, but I haven’t heard any news on that front in years.