Steam Railroading Institute’s Pere Marquette 1225

Steam Railroading Institute’s Pere Marquette 1225

 

The weekend of December 16th, 2023 I spent time chasing the Steam Railroading Institute’s Pere Marquette 1225 with fellow railfan Bryan Burton, Dak Dillon and Brian Caswell, along with many others on their last weekend of the season running this great locomotive! It was their version of a Polar Express train and while this wasn’t a photo charter like my Colorado trip, we still had plenty of opportunities to capture it in action. It was a quick, but great trip and below are a few of my favorite images from the weekend. Click here to see more!

Here’s a video for your viewing pleasure as well!

Ten days chasing steam in Colorado!

Ten days chasing steam in Colorado!

Man, where to begin with this post? Last October 2023 I spent almost two weeks with friend Bryan Burton and several others on two different steam train charters in Colorado and part of New Mexico. I’ve railfanned the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad before, but not on the end of the line between Antonito and Osier, Colorado. However, the first charter was on the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad between Durango and Silverton, Colorado and has been on my bucket list of places to photograph for a very long time and it didn’t disappoint at all! 

One of the many photo lines on our Durango Photo Charter Trip. Bryan is in the center of this shot, along with from left, fellow friends Jeffery Stoner and William Diehl. In spite of having around 70 people on this charter, everyone pretty much got along and shared spots as we usually did several photo runbys at each location.
One of the many photo lines on our Durango Photo Charter Trip. Bryan is in the center of this shot, along with from left, fellow friends Jeffery Stoner and William Diehl. In spite of having around 70 people on this charter, everyone pretty much got along and shared spots as we usually did several photo runbys at each location.
This shot was from my window seat on the first flight I’ve taken since before COVID-19 began in 2019. I tried to do a iPhone post daily during my trip and this is one such shot.

From this 10 day trip, only about 5 of the days were actually on the photo charters and the rest were days when we chased trains on our own! In case you’re not familiar on how these charters work, each one is limited to a certain number of people, Durango was about 70 and Cumbres was about 40 people. The way things worked was we all started the day on both charters before sunrise where we all boarded our trains and were taken to our first photo location for the sunrise. Everyone would get off the train and our leaders would establish photo lines where everyone stood and then the train would back up the line and steam past our location so we could photograph and video the train. Most locations they would do several run-bys so people could change spots between each run.

The days were long and the altitude was between 9,000 and just over 10,000 feet and the body of this 73 year old knew it! Fortunately my walking 10,ooo steps a day normally, helped greatly with the loading and unloading in the high altitude and thin air. I’ll admit that after a 10 -12 hour day, by the time we got back to our hotel at night, my feet were ready for a rest!! 

Rather than talking about the day by day events I’ll just let some of my pictures from the trip do the talking for me and finish this trip post up by saying, this was one of the best charter trips I think I’ve ever been on and a big shout out to the Durango and Silverton for their excellent charter and to Dak Dillon Photography for organizing and hosting the Cumbres charter! 

If you want to see more images from this trip visit this link! I’ll also include a video below from the trip for your viewing pleasure!

Cross Country trip to Washington Sate and Back

Cross Country trip to Washington Sate and Back

Well, I’m finally working on getting caught up on my posts here on the JA Roadtrips Blog! Sis has been a bit better on posting here lately to the site than I have been, but if you want to see posts from me daily, pay a visit to my main website at jimpearsonphotography.com where you can also find links to all my Social Media Accounts where I post pretty much daily.

As sis says in her post from our Washington State trip, we both had a great time and got to meet up with family and friends along the way, which is always nice during our trips. I was happy to finish off my 50th state on this trip when we cruised through Oregon on this trip. Sis is doing Hawaii with her daughter and her husband this year in May and it’s her 49th state. I guess we’ll have to plan something down the road to get to Alaska as it is the last state she hasn’t visited.

Our trip lasted for 15 days and we covered a bit over 6,000 miles during the two weeks we were on the road! I of course was interested in finding trains as always, but also enjoyed seeing other sites and places along the way, including Yellowstone National Park, where I’ve never been. Sis had been there before, but of course she was more than happy to visit it again!

We both enjoy traveling a lot and while COVID put a damper on our travels for over two years, it’s nice to be able to hit the road again to see new sites and locations.

While this post is about our cross country trip, I do have another coming up from a 10 day train photo charter I did in Colorado last fall, so stay tuned for that one! I have some other plans for trips this year, one of which will be a train photo charter to Vermont in the fall, and hopefully a few small train trips before then. Stay tuned!

Below you’ll find some of my favorite images from our trip that were made on my iPhone!

 

Mini-Trips

Mini-Trips

This past weekend, I went with two of my daughters to a Guns and Roses Concert in Nashville TN.  We left at 1pm on Saturday.  Had a meal at The Cheesecake Factory, then checked into our hotel.  We left the hotel around 5:30 to go to the concert.  Traffic was so bad that we were about 30 minutes late.  

That didn’t bother us too much because the opening act was Carrie Underwood.  She puts on a good show, but she sings mostly country, not rock.  I personally don’t care much for country music anymore.  I used to like it, but it just doesn’t appeal lately.  She finished up around 7:45 and Guns and Roses didn’t get started until nearly nine.  That didn’t seem very efficient to me, but they did put on a good show. They played until 10:30 or so.  They left all their biggest hits until the last hour.  We enjoyed it, but it was so noisy, we couldn’t even hear ourselves sing along.  It was my first Rock Concert.  Probably my last.  

It was nearly midnight by the time we got back to the hotel.  After a good night’s sleep, we headed home around eleven a.m. and stopped for food at the Clarksville Bojangles.  It was an enjoyable weekend, not just because of the concert, but because of spending time with my daughters.  Family time without all the chaotic goings on of eight young ones between four and twelve years old.  Just us grown up girls talking and enjoying each other’s company.

Kentucky Travels

Kentucky Travels

I find it somewhat strange that we’ve now visited all 48 contiguous states, but we haven’t seen all of Kentucky yet.  We’ve been many places in our state: Mammoth Cave, Cumberland Falls, Louisville, Bowling Green, Paducah, Red River Gorge, etc.  But there are still places we’ve missed.  

This past weekend, we went to one of those places.  We visited Kingdom Come State Park and The Big South Fork Railway.  Along the way, we stayed overnight at Benham Schoolhouse Inn.  Kingdom Come State Park is named after the popular Civil War novel, “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come,” by Kentucky author John Fox Jr.

The park is beautiful, the railway featured a coal mine tour that was very interesting and the Inn was comfortable and nicely furnished with friendly, helpful personnel.