InterurbanEra

Interurban Era

@InterurbanEra

Building Models & Making Videos

🚋Chill model making videos & railroad history.🚊

✨I'm one of the few people on planet Earth whose day job is building model railroads for a living! It's very fun. ✨

► Go ahead and PLEASE comment on posts, I want to start great conversations on here!

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posts from @InterurbanEra tagged #film

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InterurbanEra
@InterurbanEra

Want to learn about (real) trains? Starting from zero knowledge.

barabinson
@barabinson asked:

I don’t want to pester too much but I’d love if you could share some resources for a beginner train enthusiast. I’m talking how they work, different models and designs, maybe some global railroad history. Like if someone asked you: “Hey, I want to learn about trains,” what would be the first thing you’d recommend them to read or watch? (Real trains, not models)

BIG PICTURE: Most people with a desire to know about trains want to know:

-What kind of trains am I seeing near me, or what trains have I seen in my life?
-How do locomotives work?
-History of railroad lines & systems
-How to identify types of trains? (locomotives & rolling stock)

Youtube is probably the most fun way to learn about trains, big exciting videos with (hopefully) lush visuals to kindle interest at any age and comprehension level. Here's some of my favorite channels/videos to help you learn efficiently and potentially grow what'll definitely be a lifelong passion.

InterurbanEra
@InterurbanEra

My first film photo of a locomotive, Age 5

This is the first locomotive portrait I ever took. My mom handed me her film camera on the platform of the Amtrak station at Anaheim, CA at age 5.

Southern Pacific 6347 is an EMD GP35R rebuilt by SP to be more reliable and eek out a few more years of service, IIRC it was sold off after the merger and ended up as a WATCO engine.

Ironically it would also be the only pre-UP merger Espee portrait I'd ever take. We were taking the San Joaquin to move north to the Bay Area, and the town we settled in was on a former WP mainline and for some reason the UP freight trains exclusively used brand new GE dash 9s in armour yellow, never any ex-SP power post 1996.

The freight action through that town as so boring and the GE widecabs so relentlessly dull, it actually extinguished my interest in trains for a few years as a kid. I remember being held up as a crossing one night with my dad and saying "Ugh, I don't want to learn any more about GE AC4400s or whatever they are, aircraft seem more interesting to me now". Leave it to UP to kill my interest in railfanning at age 10.

I still cherish that my Mom handed me the camera at age 5, I still have many of the photos I took during that trip, including a Santa Fe GP30 rebuild somewhere in the central valley, and a few portraits of random passengers.