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| Re: PHOTOS: Jon's Juice Junket, part 14 - more Nashville (940778) | |||
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Re: PHOTOS: Jon's Juice Junket, part 14 - more Nashville |
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Posted by Jon Bell on Fri Jun 4 22:37:48 2010, in response to PHOTOS: Jon's Juice Junket, part 1 - New Orleans, posted by Jon Bell on Sun May 16 00:21:04 2010. This morning I did another early-morning train excursion, fortunately not as early as the one in Austin. I got up about 5:30 AM to catch the 6:40 from Lebanon: The interior should look familiar to anyone who has ridden Metra in Chicago:  After passing an outbound train just east of Donelson, we arrived at Riverfront station in Nashville at 7:30:  Fifteen minutes later, the train left again to return to Lebanon, completing the round trip at 8:40. This line is rather un-photogenic, with few publicly-accessible spots that I could identify for line-side photography. When it's not well back from nearby roads, it's mostly lined with trees or kudzu. There are a few road crossings, but most of them are hemmed in by trees. In the vicinity of Mt. Juliet, Division Street runs close to the track and provides clear views, but there are very few places to pull off the road unless you use someone's private driveway. One spot I noted was a bridge that carries the line over US 70, about five miles west of Lebanon. After I arrived back in Lebanon, one more train was due to follow, and I figured I could snap it at that bridge. When I was coming up on the bridge, I decided the picture would look better from the other side of the road, so I went under the bridge, doubled back to pass under the bridge again, and pulled off onto the wide shoulder with (I thought) a few minutes to spare. I looked in the rear-view mirror as I was reaching into my camera bag and… there went the train! Apparently they don't pay close attention to the schedule on the reverse-direction trips since they're basically deadheads anyway. I think there was one other person besides me and the crew on my return train. My inbound train was pretty well filled when we got to Nashville, but the return train was practically empty. I think the only reason they run the reverse-direction trips is that Riverfront has only a single track, and there's apparently no place nearby to store more than one train during the day. So they have to run two out of their three trains back out to Lebanon to keep them there during the day. Oh, and the ticket machine at Lebanon obviously did work. It dispenses a card that looks like the magnetic farecards that other systems use, but without a magnetic stripe. The conductor validates it the old-fashioned way, with a hand punch. That explains the $20 option: you can buy four tickets at once and save the rest for other trips. On the other hand, the ticket machine at Riverfront didn't work, but there was a guy in the station selling tickets anyway. |
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