Lost Rail

Someone once said (and many have repeated it), that "it's got to be about the going there and not the getting there." While my last post focussed on tunnel 41, there's an interesting backstory about the going there.  Back in Februrary of '07, a friend and I set about photographing some of the abandoned lines of Eastern Washington.  The Milwaukee Road was included in our plan, naturally.  What started off as a clear and sunny day in the Palouse quickly turned to fog and wet sloshy snow as my buddy's trusty Jeep headed us up into the Idaho panhandle and the resting place of the Resourceful Railroad.  We accessed the old right of way near Plummer, ID and boldly pushed our way through the sticky stuff towards the mouth of tunnel 41.  When the snows grew too deep, we hiked the last half mile and recorded the image that you see below in the previous post. Our journey out was more interesting than our journey in.  We un-stuck the jeep several times before we successf

I don't do a lot of black and white photography.  My first experiences with it were in a high school photo class and since then I've pretty much always shot color.  I migrated from print to slide film when I found the colors were more vibrant and the detail of a 50 speed film hard to beat.  More recently, I picked up digital photography.  It has great detail and excellent sharpness - although it does lack that artistic slide-film quality.   On a cold spring day back in 2007 I ventured out into the mountains near Plummer, ID.  Plummer was a famous spot for the Milwaukee Road.  At Plummer the connection to Spokane splits from the main transcon and heads north.  Meanwhile, the freight-only transcon continues its westwardly migration out into the rolling wheatfields of the Palouse.   Before its arrival on some of the world's most fertile soil, the Milwaukee road makes one more pass through the mountains of Eastern Idaho with tunnel 41.  On the western side of the tunnel a small