The Artful Engineer

We just returned from ten weeks in Alabama where my wife was on a temporary assignment for work. As you would expect, I used this as an opportunity to photograph some new places, which has given me a nice backlog of images to share. I’ll have a plenty of (green!) landscapes going forward, but I’ll start this off with images from the historic Huntsville train depot, where they have a museum and some nice rolling stock on display. The train cars were not in a good setting to feature any in their entirety, so I took a lot of tighter views. The image above—of a brightly-colored caboose—is my favorite of these. The right-hand edge of the caboose is a few pixels off the right-hand edge of the frame; I really wanted that entire yellow railing in the frame and there was barely enough room to pull it off.

This next image of a heavy door on an old freight building has great textures that are especially evident at full resolution. The dried leaf, although tiny in the frame, adds a little bit of a focus point to the image that helps it.

Old blue paint and a bit of rust always go well together. The dents and scratches and weathering tell a story of long use in this next image. Graphically, the diagonal handle contrasts nicely with all the verticals and horizontals everywhere else in the image.

Switching subjects to the depot building itself, window shots are always enhanced by a nice matching drainpipe:

This next image is not the first time I have featured lamps and their shadows. I do wonder what was on the diamond-shaped sign, too.

Wrapping up with something a little less two-dimensional, the underside of this roadway bridge next to depot had some striking corrosion patterns superimposed on the repeating patterns of the structure.

I’ll share lots more about Alabama in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading!

Postscript

When I was preparing this post a few weeks ago, I was trying to find some information online and saw articles about a fire two days earlier that consumed one of the train cars at the depot. I had images of this very boxcar from eight weeks earlier, although I didn’t originally choose to feature one of them in this post:

I decided to go over that evening to get a few pictures of it before the carcass was hauled away. Unfortunately, a few days had already passed and a chain-link fence had been erected close around it, which limited my perspectives. The angle above is not my favorite, but is the only one where I have a before-and-after comparison. I think it is kind of interesting that the faint graffiti—since it was on the lower metal portion—survived. This is another small reminder that you shouldn’t assume that there will be another chance to photograph anything that piques your interest, because you never know when a chance mishap or arsonist or idiot with a chainsaw will prevent it.

Anyway, it is a sad end to a nice bit of history.