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Thanks Melvin.
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Its funny what the reaction you get from old and I do mean "old" photos of Facebook. I posted this one when a topic came up about a teacher who ran the school ACF long long ago. A friend of mine who was in it at the same time, around the 1965 mark commented. I remember you Graham in that uniform
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It was great to catch up, and the internet has certainly done that in many ways, you would think, well I would anyway, that after all those years who apart from me would remember?.
The years have certainly past quickly .
Remember "Gone With The Wind" where a sign in the film says...."Do not squander time for that is the stuff life is made of"......
How true
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spent the morning cleaning my cinema top to bottom, so took some picsComment
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Alaska!
A week ago, we got back from our cruise to Alaska. We flew up to Anchorage from Chicago the first day. What was impressive about the flight in and the whole trip that followed, was how empty it was of human settlement, so you could never tell if you were looking at something big close up, or something immense quite far away! Other human beings and their stuff are the scale that help us how big and far natural things are.
This is what we saw from the plane:
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Alaska is one of the last truly wild places. From the air you can fly for ten minutes at a time without seeing a town, building or road. When you do see it, it looks awfully small down there. Alaska is big: It is the biggest state in the Union and larger than the next three (Texas, California and Montana) combined. Still the same, all that land with a population under a million means it has a lot of unpopulated, wild places.
At the airport, we walked out into 73F weather (23C). We’ve been pushing 90F (32C) at home so we found it absolutely wonderful! Still the same: the bus driver hurried us aboard: “C’mmmonnnn! I have the air-conditioning going! Don’t stand outside in this HEAT!”. -it’s all what you’re used to, I guess.
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The next morning, we boarded a train to ride over to our cruise ship. This is the Alaska Railroad: over 500 miles of Standard Gauge track entirely disconnected from the rest of the North American rail network by many hundreds of miles. It was built about 100 years ago to provide a connection from Fairbanks, deep in the interior, to an all-weather port at Seward, on the south coast. The cruise line used it to get us from Anchorage over to our ship at Whittier. They used the sightseeing cars to get us in the Vacation Mood!
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Near the end, we encountered something kind of interesting. There is mountain range there that isolated the roads on one side from the other, which had a 2.5 mile railroad tunnel to carry the train traffic through. There were all sorts of debates on how to get the roads through, including digging parallel tunnels, making a downright frightening mountain road through some snowy pass, or what they did: rebuild the railroad tunnel to accommodate road traffic.
It works something like this: everybody gets their turn! Eastbound road traffic, then westbound road traffic goes through, then they turn off the lights and the railroad goes through, and then a train going the other way: over and over again. It’s kind of like a ferry. There are waiting places at each end to accumulate a bunch and when the time comes they all go together. There are pull-off places throughout in case of trouble.
(As fascinating as all this sounds, I got no pictures. It was (you knowww) DARK!
Once through the tunnel, we encountered our ship: Holland America’s Noordam. I’ll be blatantly honest here: I was not very impressed with her at first sight, she looked too small! It turns out this was an optical illusion, she is actually quite large (-a bit larger than that other famous world’s largest passenger ship from 1912, actually…). It’s just with that mountain range in the background, anything looks tiny!
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This is not the destination, only the departure: stay tuned! -travel with us!
Next: Glaciers!Last edited by Steve Klare; July 17, 2022, 06:20 PM.Comment
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Steve,
Excellent write up. When I went, I boarded the ship in Vancouver. The Alaska Railroad route looks amazing!Comment
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Yes, with the temperature in London (UK) thought to get to 41C today Alaska looks very appealing!!Comment
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Glaciers!
On the flight up, I noticed a river valley with the water kind of an odd gray/white color. It turned out it really was a river, but the water was actually ice and and the river was really a glacier.
These are astounding things to see. What you have is a conveyer of solid ice several hundred feet deep and thousands of feet wide coming hundreds of miles down from the mountains. If you are on a cruise ship your encounter is where they spill into a bay. Our first one was in Glacier Bay. They would not bring the ship closer than a couple of miles from the glacier face: another ship had been damaged by hitting ice in this same place less than a week earlier, badly enough they had to debark the passengers and dock her for evaluation. We got onto a smaller excursion boat and worked our way inland to the glacier, weaving in and out of small growlers headed out to sea: most of them car size and smaller.
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There we stood. It was very quiet: once again, no towns, no roads, no buildings. -nobody there but we tourists! Every so often this sound like thunder rolled across the bay and then a section of the face broke loose and fell into the water. The boat twisted in the surf as the wave passed under us.
It was astounding even at first, but grew even more-so as we stayed there. You see, I eyeballed the glacier face as maybe 50 feet tall and about 500 feet away.
-then the Guide told us the real numbers were more like 500 Feet tall and half a mile distance! The amount of ice I thought had fallen rose from tons to maybe hundreds of tons when he said that! I am an Easterner who lives on an island that is nowhere much more than 400 feet above sea level: here was a hundred feet higher: just ICE!
They scooped out ice that had calved from the glacier. If we wanted, we could have a mix drink that was cooled with this 500-year-old ice. Otherwise, they handed it out in plastic cups. It was different than the ice in your freezer. Under intense pressure for centuries, all the air had been squeezed out and it looked more like glass than ice. To me it took an extraordinary amount of time to melt, too.
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Here’s an indication of how big these really are. There’s a boat in this picture. If you look carefully, you might be able to see it. It’s not a tiny boat, and it is probably not too close to the glacier. (-not a smart place to boat!)
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Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, a few days later.
NEXT: White Pass and Yukon Railway! (narrow gauge trains, small gauge film)
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Last edited by Steve Klare; July 18, 2022, 06:09 PM.Comment
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Meanwhile in London...
A police officer gives water to a British soldier wearing a traditional bearskin hat, on guard duty outside Buckingham Palace, during hot weather in London, Monday, July 18, 2022. The British government have issued their first-ever “red” warning for extreme heat. The alert covers large parts of England on Monday and Tuesday, when temperatures may reach 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) for the first time, posing a risk of serious illness and even death among healthy people, the U.K. Met Office, the country’s weather service, said Friday. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)Comment
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Whipped up some homemade Ice cream in Mason Jars!
Pictured: Rocky Road and Cookies N’ Cream.
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Last Night at Madison Square Garden: Billy Joel!
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Last night we rode the train into Penn Station and saw Billy Joel live in concert. He has played the Garden well over a hundred times, selling out more than 75 concerts (including last night.). He described The Billy Joel Band as Madison Square Garden's "House band".
He was great! He started out with some of his more obscure songs: maybe a little audience education. Then he said "Here's song you may know." and did The Beatles' A Day in the life. He said "I didn't write that!", although he did a pretty reasonable John Lennon.
The second set was his standards: you know them, I'm sure! The thing is so did the audience: there were a lot of people in the seats joining in.
On Long Island, where we are both from, he is very special. I grew up one township over and have friends that went to his high school. I actually can cruise the Miracle Mile if I want: it's about 15 miles from my house. I don't know if he resonates with people the same everywhere, but I'll say this: When I snapped on the local Classic Rock station on the way to work this morning: there he was with Piano Man!Last edited by Steve Klare; July 21, 2022, 11:31 AM.Comment
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Fantastic Steve
Today we were out at a place called Lincoln for Connor game playing for Springston. The temp was about 7%C but most importantly the ground was soft, it needed to be with the amount of rugby tackle going on. They were up against one of there top sides, as Connor coach told me those kids, were born with a ball in there hands Only three more games before the end of this winter session. The kids out there were really enjoying themselves and doing very well against a top junior side. Thankfully no injuries, although losing to Lincoln they did manage to score two tries. Connor got one so he is a very happy chappy plus an award and some sweets for best back of the day.
Its really great to see everyone including the coaches from both teams getting on this is country rugby not so much with cities. Anyway for a group of 12-13 year olds they all did very well, its a team effort. I did manage to get a few photos today, three of which Connor getting that ball over the line.'
Connor....going for it
Made it...
Other photos of his team mates..
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White Pass and Yukon Railroad!
You don’t need to read here too long to know I am a railroad fan, and a narrow-gauge fan at that. A hundred years ago, there were narrow gauge railways all over the world: they served low traffic areas, often in rugged country where both things made standard gauge construction too costly. Narrow gauge in the United States was basically wiped out by public paved roads and trucking, so that by the 1980s, there was only one common-carrier narrow-gauge left in the US: the White Pass and Yukon.
This line was built during (and after) the Gold Rush of 1898. It’s very special among narrow gauge routes: many never left the same state, but this one started on the Alaskan coast and went over a hundred miles inland to British Columbia in Canada. It is literally an international line, and we were briefly in Canada until we looped back and headed for tidewater. (No passports required: we never stopped!)
There were no roads also serving this route, so it remained prosperous for a very long time. During WWII, it was extremely busy as the US government used it to carry materials inland for use to build the Alaska Highway, because of the fear that the Japanese military would use Alaska to establish a North American beachhead (They had already landed forces on the Aleutians by then.). Every 3-foot gauge locomotive and freight car that was available was shipped North to the docks at Skagway and the line became a sea of exotic equipment for a while. Traffic peaked at ten times pre-war levels with three times as much equipment. It’s also unusual among US narrow gauge lines that it survived long enough and prosperously enough to dieselize. Like the Alaska Railroad, there is no connection to any other railroad, so everything that was carried inland arrived by ship. As a result, WP&Y was an early pioneer of containerized cargo handling.
All of this went on until 1982, when a major recession closed most of the mines it served and a parallel highway was built. The WP&Y was doomed as a freight railroad and soon closed down entirely.
Something interesting was taking place along this time. Southeastern Alaska was becoming a tourist destination, especially for cruise ships traveling the Inside Passage. In 1988, the White Pass and Yukon began a new life as a tourist railroad. Today they are very much in the tourist business: when we were there 5 ships were in town and a decent percentage of those thousands of passengers rode on a number of trains. It’s worth noting one of their major shareholders is Carnival Cruises.
For myself, back in the 1970s and early 1980s I was a major narrow-gauge fan! It caused me to buy my first commercial Super-8 print (-even before I owned any equipment!), and model railroading since I was an early teenager had gotten me started in Electronics. I read an article about WP&Y in a narrow-gauge magazine: still in existence, modern, busy, all things that made it special among other 3-foot gauge lines I knew about. It was 4,000 miles away, but deep down I knew I had to see it someday. When I’d heard they’d gone out of business, I doubted I ever would.
So, when my wife proposed an Alaska cruise and the WP&Y was on the docket, I was IN!
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Imagine my pleasure when I woke up docked in Skagway Harbor the morning of July 6th and saw a line of 3-foot gauge coaches from our cabin windows: I had arrived!
What I found there was a very prosperous looking narrow-gauge railroad pulling long trains of steel coaches behind quite impressive diesel locomotives. These beasts are 3,000 horsepower, 6 axle diesels which were originally a standard-gauge design intended for export to Australia, but were sent to WP&Y equipped with 3-foot gauge trucks. These would be respectable power on any standard-gauge line, but are giants as narrow-gauge engines go. It was a steep climb up that hill and it sounded like they needed every one of those 3,000 horses! The engine pulling our train left the factory brand new maybe two years ago, and seems to have a lot of siblings there.
-so the tourist gig seems to suit them just fine!
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-now, you see those bridges way up at the top of the picture? Those are on the same line we were on and the picture was shot from our train. We crossed them less than 10 minutes later. This is a real mountain railroad: It is sea-level at the Skagway docks and just a little under 3,000 feet up 20 miles away at the White Pass summit. That's why they need those big diesels on a passenger train!
I did this old-school. Back in my teens and twenties, when I went to a railroad museum, I was always packing a movie camera and a couple of cartridges, usually K-40, but every so often Plus-X or Tri-X (Black and White is actually easier to find now than when it was up to the kindness of a camera shop to stock it!). I made a lot of treasured films which I still have.
I have a medium-decent stash of cartridges in the ‘fridge. I don’t shoot film very often lately because of the present-day costs, but this was a lifetime-opportunity and it would be a waste NOT to shoot some. To everything there is a season: when they will not process these any more their potential will be lost forever if they are still languishing in the 'fridge.
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I grabbed one of my favorite cameras, Minolta XL-401: compact, simple, quiet, not such a vintage throwback that I get heckled by the Digital Video crowd. One guy did run up behind me at the station “Excuse me! Do you mind if I ask about your camera?!” -he thought it was really cool!
It was a great day, like the old days. Here I am out in chilly Alaskan breezes on the open end-platform of a 3-foot gauge coach: blazing through the mountains at a good 30MPH, I have both heels dug into the platform floor and my back wedged against the car wall so I am steady with two hands for the camera. People with cellphones hoisted aloft actually invited me into the good spots because between the camera and the look in my eye I must have looked serious about making a film!
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I now have two cartridges destined for the Lab: it’s a blistering 90F here at home, so I’ll hold off mailing them a few weeks, but I got my trophies for the day. We show a lot of films at Christmas, so we will have a special treat among them.
This is Super-8 out in the wild: not a pleasant evening sitting with a projector in a darkened room with a well-planned program, but chaotic, unpredictable, sometimes even athletic action in broad daylight. I loved doing it, and get the feeling that somehow, I will manage to scare up the bucks to get a couple of new cartridges for the ‘fridge so I can do it again some other day!
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Skagway Harbor Outbound: It was a good day!
NEXT: Alaskan Miscellany!
Last edited by Steve Klare; July 23, 2022, 06:44 PM.Comment
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Steve, your posts on the trip to Alaska are very interesting. If I were you, I would package them up and submit an article to Sunset Magazine (which is widely read on the US west coast).
This link has more information on article submissions.Comment
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