Railroad Collisions,
A Deadly Story of Mismanaged Risk by George Swimmer
ABOVE: The early 2000s saw frequent trips to Newark, N.J., to capture the last days of PCC cars on the Newark City Subway. A pair of the classics pass at Davenport Avenue in August 2001. BELOW: Your editor swore he never saw SEPTA’s Kawasaki cars running as a pair — until he discovered slides from a fantrip sponsored by the Philadelphia Chapter NRHS in September 1990 that he rode. STEVE BARRY PHOTOS
when I find a loose slide lying around five years from now I’ll know immediately if it’s been scanned already or not. At the risk of jinxing myself, I hope to have all the scanning done in another 12 to 14 months (if the scanner survives the volume). Once scanned, everything goes back into
the slide pages and into the binders. Stuff that was in yellow boxes go into slide pages as well. Oh, and why scan everything? Why not just scan the best? It’s actually faster to dump 60 slides into the scanner’s batch feeder, scan everything, and sort it out in Lightroom than it is to go through the slides with a loupe and only pick out a few. Each batch of 60 takes about an hour to scan. When I’m not in magazine deadlines and can tend to the scanner, I can get 300 slides scanned in a day. So, getting back to memory lane. . . Right
now September 2000 is going through the scanner, and the big trip that month was a circle from Regina, Sask., that took me across the Canadian prairie, down into Glacier Park in Montana, across to Spokane, Wash., and back north into the Canadian Rockies before
getting back to Regina. Along the way there are shots of the last days of the Camas Prairie operation in Idaho, Montana Rail Link semaphores, wooden grain elevators galore, and a chase of the Royal Canadian Pacific powered by an F-unit. Good stuff. As for stuff I don’t even remember doing,
one example stands out (although there are plenty of others). I organize streetcar trips for the Wilmington Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society, and a couple of years ago I decided we should try a trip double-heading two of SEPTA’s Kawasaki streetcars. They do m.u. together, but SEPTA almost never runs them that way. I had never seen them coupled up, so it would provide some unique photo opportunities. And to really make it interesting, I wanted car No. 9000 (the first in the series) running with car No. 9111 (the last in the series). I thought it was a really cool, original idea. Then I started scanning slides from September 1990 and discovered I had ridden a two-car charter with the Philadelphia Chapter NRHS. And the two cars used were
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georgeswimmer1@gmail.com An examination of
the mismanagement and misinformation that endanger lives
throughout America’s sprawling rail system.
Available in paperback from Amazon and as an e-book from Kindle
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