#interurban

Interurban Residence, Seattle, Washington, USA,

Courtesy: Heliotrope Architects,

Interiors by Amy Baker Interior Design,

Landscape by Land Morphology Landscape Architects,

Bellflower Bound

Here's a neat little shortline operation in Iowa, the Iowa Traction Railway. They operate entirely electrically on over 100 year old electric locomotives. Incase anyone who isn't already big on trains sees this; electric trains have been a thing since before diesel or gas trains were big and the US used to have 91% of all the electric rail in the world! (though, that only made up 1% of the network). This line used to be an interurban passenger operation, but pivoted to freight and survived even with electric operations.

Anyway, I spent a day railfanning them with my dad back in March of last year. In this first photo we see the crew of ITAR 50 (Blt. 1920) looking back on a cut of cars on Black and White film.

Here is 50 pulling out an old Southern Pacific boxcar from the interchange for a customer.

They spot it at the customer, drop it off, and pull out. Clean and simple.

On one end of the line, now only used for storage, a semaphore is seen permanently in the yellow, "approach", position. This signal has been out of use for many a moon, but still stands as a testament to how busy the line once was, not just for freight, but for passenger.