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Looking Back at ’23, Looking Forward to ’24

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Siemens Desiro HC EMU at Jerusalem-Navon Station, Jerusalem, Israel, June 7, 2022

Devout fans of this website might have noticed no new content has been added for nearly 11 months.  I had expected to make headway on a photo backlog that includes most of the photos I took in 2022 and if you had asked me 12 months ago, I would have predicted that most if not all of those photos would be online by now.  Needless to say, that hasn’t happened yet.

After a 2022 that had enough travel for me to earn status with United Airlines for the first time, I’m not surprised that I traveled much less in 2023.  However, life was busy in other ways.  I had the opportunity to do the Five Boro Bike Tour in New York City in May, which was a wonderful way to experience the city very differently than how I experience it when traveling by subway or bus.  Mrs. Oren’s Transit Page and I bought a house about 4 miles from where we were previously living, so the home buying process followed by moving took up much of the late summer and fall.  

MPM-10 train at Lionel-Groulx Station, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 30, 2023

In terms of transit related highlights, I had the opportunity to tour the DC Streetcar Barn in April.  In May, I visited the new Potomac Yard Metrorail station on its opening day.  The biggest trip of the year brought me to Montreal for the first time in over 20 years.  I look forward to sharing the photos from that trip at some point, hopefully before the calendar turns to 2025.  In the fall, work travel brought me to Orlando for the first time in nearly 20 years.  A second work trip allowed me to ride Amtrak’s Empire Service from New York City to Albany during the peak fall foliage period, which was a pretty trip to say the least.  It was this level of “busy-ness” that led me to pausing the photos of the month for the past three months, there wasn’t even time for those posts!  Photos from some of these trips as well as many of my travels around the Washington, DC area aren’t even in the Uncaptioned & Unsorted Photos gallery yet, but I hope to get them there soon.

Alstom Citadis 305 in Athens, Greece, September 3, 2022

I tend to approach the photo queue in chronological order, so many photos from Israel as well as photos from a work trip to Greece that I took in 2022 are likely to appear online before the 2023 photos are captioned and sorted into their proper pages.  I hope the wait is ultimately worth it.

As of now, I’m not expecting 2024 to be a heavy travel year, but since when do prognostications in late December and early January turn out to be entirely accurate?  Perhaps it will give me the opportunity to catch up on the seemingly never empty photo queue.  I’m also giving thought to sharing some of the material that I would potentially share in Oren’s Reading List posts directly to Facebook instead of waiting to draft a post here.  Would that be considered to be an improvement?  Let me know by leaving a comment below.  And as always, thanks for dropping in and checking out my work.  I really appreciate it.

 

Some Things Are Worth Waiting For…

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New Flyer XE60 19506
Very observant visitors to this site might have noticed two things recently.  First, it has been a very long time (nearly two years in fact) since any announcements of new photos being posted to Oren’s Transit Page have been made.  Second, the January 2023 Bus Photo of the Month came from a city that was not included on Oren’s Transit Page before.  The reasons for this are several fold.  In 2021, travel was slowly resuming and the Oren’s Transit Page Baby (as he was known then) required a level of care that was age-appropriate but one that does not facilitate frequent website updates.  In 2022, travel really took off again, as my travels took me not only up and down the Northeast Corridor but to the Florida panhandle, San Diego, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Israel, and Greece.  As you can imagine, travels that extensive generate lots of photos, which in turn, take time to organize, touch up, caption, and post.  The good news is I’ve made some headway on that front, and I believe any photos I took prior to May 2022 are now online.

The “highlights” from this update in my opinion in “chronological” order are:

The rest of 2022’s photos are still to come, and I’ve already taken one trip within the US in 2023 and I’m sure more are to come, so stay tuned.  The photos from all those travels will be posted.  Eventually.

Here is the full listing of where new photos were added to the site, with new sections highlighted in bold and italics.  

Enough Teases, Here’s What’s New and Updated for the Start of 2021!

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Ventura County Railway No. 2
Anyone who knows where I’ve traveled or has visited the site with some frequency over the years may have noticed that the Bus Photo of the Month for January 2021 was from a city that had not been included on Oren’s Transit Page before, and that I’ve been highlighting a number of new website sections over the past few weeks. 

The biggest and most noteworthy additions are the brand new sections for Baltimore, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Austin.  As I noted in a recent post, there was a certain amount of irony to the fact I grew up 40 miles from Baltimore and am an avid Orioles fan, yet the city had not been featured on this site until recently.  Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Austin were destinations that I traveled to in late 2019 and early 2020 before the Covid-19 pandemic, and I am thankful to have had the opportunity to make those trips when I did.  

I also took advantage of some time I had recently to move some photos that had been on the Uncaptioned Photos page for quite awhile and put them in more appropriate places on the website, most notably, the photos of the Pikes Peak Cog Railway now have their own page.  Perhaps you found the new material on your own, but if not, here is the full listing of where new photos were recently added to the site, with new sections highlighted in bold and italics.  

Photos from Vegas don’t have to stay in Vegas

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The Bellagio Fountains, Paris Las Vegas, and Bally’s Las Vegas, August 15, 2019

Saying that City X is unlike any other city in the world might sound cliché, but I think there are cities that truly have a different vibe that no other city can come close to replicating.  For example, I was reminded of the grandeur of Washington, DC’s main downtown avenues and the sweeping views from the National Mall while standing on the Monumental Axis in Brasilia.  Walking through the markets of Istanbul triggered senses similar to walking through the markets in the Old City of Jerusalem.  However, Las Vegas is truly unlike any other city that I have been to on account of the many casinos and their varying architectural styles.  Just walking somewhere is a tourist activity in and of itself.

The Las Vegas transit system is also notable for several features.  Firstly, I think it is fair to say the transit system is simultaneously catering to two different markets.  There is a transit system geared towards the needs of the local population, connecting where they live to where they work and shop.  The second market is the tourist market, which relies on the transit system to get from attraction to attraction along the Strip and in the Downtown area.  There is overlap between the markets, for example, the Deuce route along the Strip is the main route in this corridor and used by both groups, but my feeling was that the RTC is catering to two distinct groups and needs simultaneously.  

Secondly, the network is notable for the amount of privately operated routes and modes over the course of the city’s history.  The privately operated Las Vegas Transit System (LVTS) was not taken over by the public RTC until the early 1990s, as LVTS was able to subsidize its residential routes by charging high fares on its route serving the Strip.  The Las Vegas Monorail is a privately owned enterprise that received no public funding for its construction or operation (though ownership was transfered to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority after its private operator declared bankruptcy in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic).  

Keeping with the city’s reputation of being unlike any other place, while it is not the only North American transit operator to use double decker buses, it is the only one I can think of that does not use them primarily on commuter routes with little turnover at each stop.  While this isn’t uncommon in places such as London, it is unusual for a North American transit property.  

Observing and photographing the system is also quite the experience.  Pedestrian crowds often make it difficult to get the types of shots I typically prefer, focusing on the vehicle and its architectural or natural surroundings.  Heavy traffic also makes it hard to set up and get shots of the vehicles with the unique casino buildings as backdrops.  Finally, nighttime photography is also challenging due to the amount of artificial light created by billboards and other illuminated displays, forcing one to “unlearn” some of the tricks usually used for those types of shots.  

I’m glad I had the opportunity to go to Las Vegas when I did, as it is fair to say a trip to the city going forward is not going to be anything like how it was when I went in August 2019 in the near future.  I do hope the city experiences a full recovery as the pandemic subsides, as tourism and entertainment are the primary workforce sectors in the city and many are likely experiencing hardship due to the lack of tourists visiting the city.  Is it high on my list of places to make a return trip to?  Probably not, as I can think of many other cities that I’d like to visit for a first time before going to Las Vegas for a second time, but I would also certainly welcome the opportunity to go back sometime if the occasion was right.  

A selection of highlights from the Las Vegas section can be seen below, or you can see all the photo galleries by clicking here.  

OTP is Finally Linked to Baltimore

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With nearly 1,600 photos from the Washington, DC area, you would think this website might have had a Baltimore section by now, since the two cities are only about 40 miles apart and I grew up just outside DC.  In fact, there are more photos on this website from the Washington, DC area than anywhere other than Israel.  Yet until now, there was no Baltimore section on this site. 

There are several reasons for this that I can think of.  The first one is that typically, I’ve gone to Baltimore for Orioles games, and while one can take public transit to get to the ballpark from DC for weeknight games, there is no great public transit option to get back home.  This is also the case on weekends for both directions of travel.  And while traffic on Interstate 95 between the two cities can be abysmal at rush hour, one can get from Baltimore to the close-in DC suburbs in under an hour once the game is over on a weeknight or anytime on a weekend.  In other words, it makes sense to drive.  

Another reason is that aside from the Orioles (remember that DC did not have a baseball team from 1972 until the start of the 2005 season), I never had much of a reason to go to Baltimore.  I suppose I could have made a point of going there to check out the trains and buses, but could also just stay closer to home and explore in Montgomery County, Northern Virginia, or DC itself.  

This isn’t to say I never rode on Baltimore transit until recently.  I took the light rail once in 1999, caught a bus once to get to where the car was parked after a deluge caused an Orioles game I was at to be postponed, and I had been on MARC a handful of times.  However, one must also consider the fact that the Metro Subway did not provide Sunday service until September 2, 2001, and the light rail only operates from 11 AM to 7 PM on Sundays to this day, so in some ways the opportunities to ride these modes was limited by their hours of operation.

Recently, I’ve had more occasions to be in Baltimore, and finally had the chance to explore the Metro Subway in November 2018.  After that, I felt that there were enough photos from the Baltimore area that it finally made sense to post those, as well as any other random Baltimore transit pictures I happened to have from the past (I found some, there might be more hiding in an archive of an old hard drive I have yet to uncover).  

So now there are a total of 50 photos of transit in the Baltimore area, including the core bus service, Metro SubwayLink, and Light RailLink.  Yes, it is only a fraction of what I have in the DC section, and there are cities I’ve spent far less time in that have larger sections on this website, but it seems fitting that considering where I grew up and that I do find myself in Baltimore not infrequently, there is finally a place for its transit photos to be featured on my site.  

A selection of highlights from the Baltimore section can be seen below, or you can see all the photo galleries by clicking here.  

Looking Back at a Year of “Unexpected Service Disruptions”

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Stretching my legs in Tuscon while riding the eastbound Sunset Limited in January 2020

As 2020 comes to an end, I think it is fair to say that little went as planned after mid-March.  That was certainly the case in my life.  This website isn’t meant to be a wide open door in to my personal life and I’m not changing that now, but I did want to share a few reflections on a year that ended up looking nothing like what I thought it would twelve months ago.  

I expected to have two big trips during 2020, and one of them took place as scheduled.  In mid-January, I flew out to Los Angeles, a good friend of mine and I took the Sunset Limited and Texas Eagle to Austin, and spent a few days there.  I then flew up to Denver where Mrs. Oren’s Transit Page and I attended a wedding.  Those were my only Amtrak and flight segments of the year.  

I had thought I’d mark a significant website anniversary in September, as I have now been running this website for 20 years!  However, there were some significant life changing events in my household each month from May through October.  Some were unexpected, and dealing with those meant whatever I could have potentially planned to commemorate this milestone had to be pushed off.  Building, maintaining, and adding to this website is truly a labor of love.  What started with about 200 photos 20 years ago now has over 11,000 photos from across the United States as well as nineteen other countries.  It has introduced me to transit fans from all over and based on email I’ve received over the years, has been a useful resource to many.

While some of the big life events in the summer and early fall months were unexpected, others were not.  Most notably, Mrs. Oren’s Transit Page and I welcomed an Oren’s Transit Page Baby (AKA Baby OTP) in to the world in May.  I never would have guessed that at age 7 months he is still waiting for his first ride on public transit, but I still hope to have that opportunity with him soon, and he comes to tolerate my hobby at a minimum should he rather not partake in it.  

Baby OTP and his father wait to photograph an approaching bus in Pittsburgh in October 2020.  Until he has agency of his own, Baby OTP will sometimes have to participate in Daddy’s hobby.  It is hoped that he continues to participate out of his own choosing as he grows older.  Photo by Mrs. Oren’s Transit Page.  

One advantage to limited travel opportunities is I did have time to get through my photo queue, which had photos in it dating back to 2017.  In addition, I also went through and created sections for some photos that were uncaptioned and unsorted for a number of years because I wasn’t sure where to place them on the website, and I now had the time to consider those decisions in a thoughtful manner.  As I write this, there are only seven (!) photos in the Uncaptioned and Unsorted Photo Gallery, whereas the number has usually had three digits for most of the past few years.  I look forward to highlighting what I’ve added to the site very soon.  

If I had some degree of confidence about how 2020 would turn out when considering the question on December 31, 2019, I can say with a high degree of certainty I have no idea what will come in 2021.  I hope to be able to travel more extensively than I did in 2020, as Baby OTP has many relatives who have yet to meet him in person.  At the very least, I hope it is safe for him to experience transit beyond his singing cuddle bus toy.  

So here’s to hoping for a less eventful 2021 for everyone!  As hard as it is for people who are likely visiting this site to do this, please avoid traveling and make safe choices (including getting vaccinated as soon as possible) so that we can go back to adventuring, seeing friends in person, and enjoying our passions to the fullest once again.

A photo of a Route 21 bus in Ithaca, NY to welcome us to 2021

Revisiting 2019 With New Photos on Oren’s Transit Page

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Birney Replica Streetcar 436
The age of Coronavirus may not be good for traveling, but it is good for emptying out the “photo queue” of pictures I would like to post and share here on my site.  With this update, I believe that nearly all the transit photos I took during 2019 and intended to post to Oren’s Transit Page are in fact posted!

Last March, I was able to attend Orioles spring training in Sarasota, and also spent time in Tampa on that trip as well.  I had never been to the west coast of Florida before so it was interesting to see what the transit operations on the Florida Suncoast are like.  With this site update, you can too, as there are over 30 photos from this area now on the site!  You can find the new galleries for HART (including the TECO Streetcar Line), PSTA, MCAT, and SCAT in the Tampa & Florida Suncoast section.  (How’s that for some agency alphabet soup?)

Brooklyn Car 4573
In June, a planned trip to Boston became a road trip due to a flight cancelled following thunderstorms.  Since our return trip was on my birthday, Mrs. Oren’s Transit Page indulged me and permitted a stop at the Shore Line Trolley Museum in East Haven, CT.  (We had lunch at a favorite restaurant of hers in New Haven as well).  

Throughout the summer, many transit fans’ attention was turned to Alexandria, VA, where DASH acquired Neoplan articulated buses from Bee Line in Westchester County, NY in order to supplement service during WMATA’s Platform Improvement Project on the Blue and Yellow Lines.  WMATA, DASH, and contracted tour bus operators operated the various bus bridges that replaced Metrorail service.  I ventured out one day to photograph the shuttle buses and ride one of the former Bee Line Neoplans, and those photos are also now online.  While this may be the “highlight” of the newest additions to the site from the DC area, there are a total of 15 new DASH photos, 6 new ART photos, and over 50 new WMATA photos.

Neoplan AN460 612
Finally, in November, I was in Pittsburgh for the second time (my first trip was in 2015).  I didn’t take as many transit rides while I was there as I had planned, but I did take about 50 photos of PAT buses and light rail vehicles that are now on the website, including some of their buses decorated for the Christmas holiday season and the Monongahela Incline, which I rode for the first time.

You may have noticed that I wrote that nearly all the photos from 2019 are now online, so you may also be wondering what is still to come.  In August, I visited both Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, so photos of the transit operations in those places (did you know the National Park Service operates a fleet of New Flyer C40LF and C40LFR buses on the South Rim of the canyon?), as well as many photos from a city taken over the course of many years that you would have expected to be on my site already in light of its proximity to Oren’s Transit Page Headquarters will be in the next site update.  Stay tuned!

Here is the complete list of pages with new photos in this update:

 

 

New York City is Back on Oren’s Transit Page

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96th Street/2nd Avenue
When I redesigned my website to use WordPress instead of coding everything by hand as I had since initial launch nearly 20 years ago, I opted to launch the new design without including the New York City section.  That decision was made in January 2016 due to the fact that rebuilding process included reuploading all the original images on the site, reentering their captions, and building out pages for each city, agency, and vehicle type.  The New York City section has always been one of the largest on my site, and it seemed better to push out the redesigned website minus one section than to hold it back until it was 100 percent complete.  Finding the time to complete the redesign of the New York section hasn’t always been easy, especially since I much prefer to add new content rather than tinker with code and rebuild old pages when I have time to work on the site.  However, nearly four years later, I am pleased to announce that the New York City section of the site has been rebuilt and many new photos have been added to this section.

Since the redesigned Oren’s Transit Page was launched, there have been some significant changes to the New York City Transit scene.  The most notable development is probably the opening of the long awaited Second Avenue Subway, but that isn’t all that has happened in recent years.  The Hudson Yards Extension of the 7 line opened in 2015, and multiple subway car types, including the seemingly ageless R32s and the R42s have been retired and the R179s have been introduced.  The venerable RTS buses have also been retired and New Flyer and NovaBUS now fulfill most of the MTA’s equipment purchases.  The Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North fleets remain dominated by new car types, though a handful of M3s continue to hang on at each railroad.  The “Oculus”, the centerpiece of the reconstructed PATH station at the World Trade Center, officially opened in March 2016.  

Between images that had been on the site prior to 2016 and new images added during the redesign (including pretty much everything that was New York related in my photo queue at this point), there are now nearly 1,400 photos of New York City transportation here on Oren’s Transit Page.  I invite you to check them out at the redesigned New York City section, and as always, there will be more to come when my travels take me to New York.

Click here to visit the New York City section of Oren’s Transit Page.  A very small selection of teaser photos from this update can be found below.

New Flyer XD40 4827

New Flyer XD40 4827 on Cadman Plaza West at Middagh Street, September 4, 2019

R62A 1750

R62A 1750 at 42nd Street-Grand Central, March 24, 2017

1958 GMC TDH-5106 Old Look 9098

1958 GMC TDH-5106 Old Look 9098 on East 42nd Street at 3rd Avenue, December 12, 2012

M-3

M-3 at White Plains, April 24, 2012

34th Street-Hudson Yards

34th Street-Hudson Yards, December 27, 2015

New Photos from the Land of Enchantment (& More)

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Albuquerque, NM
In August, I visited New Mexico for the first time (unless you count passing through on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief back in 2014).  Although I was only there for four full days, I did have some opportunities to photograph the transit available in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and in between.  Both cities have sizable bus networks, though the latter is larger than that of the former.  In addition, the Rail Runner Express operates commuter rail service between those same cities.  Unfortunately, for such a short stay and due to other logistical constraints, I didn’t actually ride any of these systems, though photographing them while trying to capture the local architectural styles in some of my photographs while doing so was fun!

This update also includes photos from around the DC area, including photos of MARC’s newest diesel locomotives, the DC Circulator’s new Proterra electric buses, and more!

Here is the complete list of pages with new photos in this update:

 

 

New Photos from Israel & Washington, DC Added

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VDL Bus SB230 76273
The summer travel season is well underway, and photos from my adventures in May and June are now available for your viewing pleasure here on Oren’s Transit Page.

Most of the new content can be found in the Israel section, where you will find new photos of the Jerusalem Light Rail, Egged buses in Jerusalem (including the Solaris Urbino 18 unit currently on trial), Egged Ta’avura buses in Jerusalem, Afikim buses in Jerusalem, Kavim buses in Jerusalem, and Superbus buses in both Jerusalem and Tiberias.  If you haven’t been to Israel lately, with the entry of the Golden Dragon and Yutong bus models from China and Solaris buses from Poland in to the Israeli market, there is quite a bit of diversity in Israeli operators’ fleets beyond the typical MAN and Mercedes-Benz buses that have dominated the scene for years.  You can also find photos of the exterior of the new Jerusalem High Speed Railway station (the interior of the much delayed station will be open to the public this fall if you believe the latest rumors).

In addition, new photos of various WMATA equipment types have been added as well.

Here is the complete list of pages with new photos in this update: