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When it comes to being a rail fan, I still am a kid at heart. Now I just have adult tools. Long ago traded are: my BMX bike for a car; my mother's 120mm camera for a digital SLR; and the turn-your-ear-up-and-listen-for-a-distant-horn for a scanner.
I grew up in Missoula, MT the son of a gandy dancer. My father to this day operates a Tamper for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Hired on by the Northern Pacific a year before that railroad became a part of the Burlington Northern, my father made a good living from the steel road. Railroading not only provided a happy childhood for me, it has always been a consuming interest for me as well.
My mother once stated that, "Railroading and sailing stays in the family." While I didn't make a career in railroading, I spend uncountable hours, perched trackside in all weather conditions waiting for the next train. And from an outsider's point of view, railroading hasn't changed that much. Aside from mergers and obvious, technological advancements - trains still move commerce from point-A to point-B.
When I was eighteen, I considered a life on the road as an engineer. I was drifting towards the end of my teens without even carrying a driver's license. I was in middle of a ten year "phase," and didn't think I would fit the mold. Now I realize I was right, but on some level regret not trying. No matter how un-cool I thought rail fanning was, I thumbed through train magazines quickly in bookstores and stealthily stole looks at trains in rearview mirrors after passing trains.
I am now a 30-something Foamer. I ended up a paramedic; not as an engineer. Never taking myself seriously, I see commonality in the two jobs. Trains and ambulances stop traffic (although, trains trump even ambulances at crossings). We both transport. Finally, we both get to see what the average person can't (yet, I would prefer seeing the Scenic sub from the cab of an SD40-2, than the storeroom of Target to get an injured employee).
Luckily I married a woman who doesn't mind sitting shotgun on a Saturday or Sunday to chase trains. I only say luckily, because I hadn't rekindled my rail enthusiasm prior to marrying her. This past summer, I found out she has a passion for steam locomotives. When my attention fades, she has quite often alerted me in time to jump out of the car to capture photos of approaching trains.
It was a crisp fall day in October of 2003 when I coaxed my wife to Union Jct with a 35mm Mamiya camera my aunt gave me over 15 years earlier. The photos were less than desirable, but uploaded some to RailPictures.net anyway. By Thanksgiving '03, I convinced my wife that buying a Fuji S5000 digital SLR was a good thing. 12,000 photos later, I rationalized purchasing the used Canon 10D I had been eyeing - along with two lenses. At the time of this autobiography, I have snapped 9800 images on the Canon in ten and a half short months.
TwinCitiesRailfan.com began as a catalog for the bulk of my photographs. Many pictures here can be found at RailPictures.net. The rest are of varying quality, but document details, paint schemes, road numbers and, in general, my effort and insatiable appetite for railroading.
As photos accumulated, keeping an HTML-based site was laborious. Not to mention the site was difficult for visitors to navigate and quickly find thier favorites. Now you are visiting the database-driven site, powered by PHP. It took several months to teach myself PHP, but has clearly paid off!