I started photographing from the perch at Denver’s Union Station in March of 2015, when Amtrak announced they were going to run a Winter Park ski train to see if there was still interest after the Rio Grande stopped running the ski train a few years earlier.
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This past May I took a week-long business trip in the UK, starting in Aberdeen, Scotland on Monday morning and ending at London Heathrow at the end of the day on Friday. Normally this type of travel is grueling and exhausting, and I would have groaned, except our business partner insisted I travel each evening to the next city by train. By train!! My frown turned to a grin.
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Markópoulo (Greek: Μαρκόπουλο Μεσογαίας) is a market and farming town in Attica, east of Athens. For many years, it was a bustling market center that retained its small-town look, although it was only an hour or so drive from Athens. But recently, developers built houses and condominium apartments, some out in the olive fields. As usual, I am mystified; who are the potential customers? Today, Athens Elefthérios Venizélos International Airport is only a few kilometers away and the area is slowly becoming more commercial.
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Back in an earlier era of railroading, it was not uncommon to move station buildings from one location to another. It may have been a short procedure necessitated by work on a new track alignment. Or, if a new, larger station was being built in a town, the smaller existing structure might be loaded on a flat car and transported by rail to a new town. Temporary stations were sometimes built specifically to be moved from site to site as needed during construction. Even to this day, it is not uncommon to see depots vacated by the railroads moved from the right-of-way to new sites for historical preservation as museums, or for other commercial uses.
The small Victorian station originally located in Quincy, Pennsylvania may be a contender for the record number of moves, but this time all in the interest of historical rail preservation.
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Situated deep in the New River Gorge National River area is a little-known Amtrak station in Prince, West Virginia. In the late spring of 2018, my family and I used it as a jumping off point for a trip on Amtrak to Yellowstone National Park. The station is still served three days a week on Amtrak’s Cardinal line and is in CSX’s New River subdivision.
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By 1880, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway had an operating depot in the City of Topeka, Kansas. For roughly the next 120 years, that depot was manned daily by a ticket agent until Amtrak went to a five day work week for the agent. During the days when the Santa Fe operated the depot, trains like the California Limited, Grand Canyon, Antelope, Kansas Cityan, and Scout all made stops at Topeka, along with many nameless trains known only by a number. The number of trains would decrease in the years leading up to the inception of Amtrak. When Amtrak began operating over the Santa Fe, trains like the Super Chief, El Capitan, and Texas Chief all made stops in Topeka during the early years of Amtrak Service.