Steel Bridge, MAX coming and going on a blue sky day.

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September 20, 2011, a Tuesday. 1:50 p.m. I rode the MAX Yellow Line to the clinic at Kaiser Interstate to get my eyes checked. There was a giant floater in the right one, sort of like a black fern, but it didn't get in the way of my seeing this opportunity to take a photo of the MAX Green Line heading towards us on the Steel Bridge as we crossed the Willamette River heading northeast. There's a gentle curve in the tracks here that allows this exciting view from one train to the other. By the way, the floater eventually disappeared, thank goodness. And, once again, I have found a bit of blue sky day to share with you.

Sky-writing jets, #2

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Once I got on the MAX Yellow Line, I sat in the sunny light rail car enjoying the view. In this photo the train is on the Steel Bridge just about to cross over the Willamette River. The two sets of tracks you see are for the MAX Red Line and the MAX Blue Line. The MAX Green Line approaches the bridge on the same tracks as the MAX Yellow Line. All four cross the river on the Steel Bridge, then branch out to serve various places in the greater metropolitan area on both the east and west sides of the river. It wasn't until I uploaded the photos to iPhone that I noticed a bit of jet trail in the photo. For more serendipity, there's the Big Pink on the skyline.
 

I like the blue sky reflected in the Willamette River. And look at all the jet trails!

At the north end of Tom McCall Waterfront Park

These three caught my attention because they appeared to be taking a break, enjoying the sunshine. Piled around the base of the lamp post, note the backpack, purse, and a jacket which appears to be draped over another backpack. I wonder how far they'd walked when they decided to stop for a while.

Seems to me that the woman is about to walk off to find something to photograph--I see what might be a camera strap in front of her, and she's holding her hands in such a way as to make me think she's got a camera.

The people you can see in the distance along the gray railing are on the lower level of the Steel Bridge, on the section set aside for pedestrians and bicyclists. Railroad tracks fill the center of the lower level, and there's another pedestrian/bicyclists path on the north side of the bridge. To tell you the truth, folks on skates and/or skateboards more than likely cross the Willamette River on this part of the Steel Bridge, too. You can easily see the brown waters of the river--we'd had plenty of rain lately. That's why the sunshine provided such an allure to those with the wherewithal to get out and about.

I found it interesting that the only one sitting is the youngest, perhaps because he's still agile and able to easily get up from sitting on what is essentially a curb.

The fullness of the blossoms on this tree makes for a lovely sight, don't you think?

Come back tomorrow for a bit of serendipity--something unique about the gray-haired man! Taking a close look at his right ear provides a hint, a preview, a clue.

A sunny view of the flowering cherry trees at Tom McCall Waterfront Park

A scene I've missed getting to see up close for the last several years. Bound and determined not to miss it this year, I took advantage of the sunshine on March 24 and walked through Tom McCall Waterfront Park from the Saturday Market all the way to the Steel Bridge. I continued onto the bridge and took this photo looking south. I wish the trees had been in full bloom, but one can't be too picky around here, what with gray skies, rain, and wind impacting the span of time the flowers are actually on the tree limbs.

Steel Bridge over the Willamette River, altered with Picnik

Westbound traffic lane and a vehicle, plus MAX tracks and a westbound MAX train emerging from the Steel Bridge; eastbound MAX train, and the Steel Bridge. Thanks to Flickr contact drburtoni for suggesting that I take the altered image you see below and make it black and white.


I took the original photo on October 8, 2011. This one is altered with the Picnik special effect HDR-ish.

From the Internet:

The Steel Bridge is a through truss, double lift bridge across the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, United States. Its lower deck carries railroad and bicycle/pedestrian traffic, while the upper deck carries road traffic (on the Pacific Highway West No. 1W, former Oregon Route 99W) and light rail (MAX), making the bridge one of the most multimodal in the world. It is the only double-deck bridge with independent lifts in the world and the second oldest vertical-lift bridge in North America, after the nearby Hawthorne Bridge. The bridge links the Rose Quarter and Lloyd District in the east to Old Town Chinatown neighborhood in the west.

The bridge was completed in 1912 and replaced the Steel Bridge that was built in 1888 as a double-deck swing-span bridge. The 1888 structure was the first railroad bridge across the Willamette River in Portland. Its name originated because steel, instead of wrought iron, was used in its construction, very unusual for the time. When the current Steel Bridge opened, it was simply given its predecessor's name.

The structure was built by Union Pacific Railroad and the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company at a cost of $1.7 million. It opened in July 1912 to rail traffic and on August 9, 1912 to automobiles. In 1950, the Steel Bridge became an important part of a new U.S. 99W highway between Harbor Drive and Interstate Avenue. Harbor Drive was removed in 1974 and replaced with Tom McCall Waterfront Park.

Between 1984 and 1986 the bridge underwent a $10 million rehabilitation, including construction of the MAX light rail line.
In 2001, a 220-foot (67 m) long and 8-foot (2.4 m) wide cantilevered walkway was installed on the southern side of the bridge's lower deck as part of the Eastbank Esplanade construction, raising to three the number of publicly accessible walkways across the bridge, including the two narrow sidewalks on the upper deck. The bridge is owned by Union Pacific with the upper deck leased to Oregon Department of Transportation, and subleased to TriMet, while the City of Portland is responsible for the approaches.
The upper deck was closed again for summer 2008 for maintenance and to allow a junction to be built at the west end for the MAX Green Line. The lower deck of the bridge was threatened by major floods in 1948, 1964, and 1996.

The lift span of the bridge is 211-foot (64 m) long. At low river levels the lower deck is 26 feet (7.9 m) above the water, and 163 feet (50 m) of vertical clearance is provided when both are raised. Because of the independent lifts, the lower deck can be raised to 72 feet (22 m), telescoping into the upper deck but not disturbing it. Each deck has it own counterweights, two for the upper and eight for the lower, totaling 9,000,000 lb (4,100 metric tons).

The machinery house is above the upper-deck lift span with an operator's room suspended below the house so that the operator can view river traffic as well as the upper deck. The average daily traffic in 2000 was 23,100 vehicles (including many TriMet bus lines), 200 MAX trains, 40 freight and Amtrak trains, and 500 bicycles. The construction of the lower-deck walkway connected to the Eastbank Esplanade resulted in a sharp increase in bicycle traffic, with over 2,100 daily bicycle crossings in 2005.

Great technical diagrams at this link, as well as photos.

Enter for your chance to ... ?

I'm riding on the MAX train on the right, the red and white one you can see curving to the left. I love how these two tracks lead to a gentle 400-foot serpentine when two trains meet along NW Hoyt and NW 3rd Avenue, on the west end of the Steel Bridge.

I can't tell from the reflections exactly what one could win if one entered whatever--surely it's not crab legs. Nor can I tell what sort of bottles of beer appear.

I took this photo on September 20, 2011. It's been altered at Picnik with the Effect HDR-ish.

The Willamette River runs high right now.

I took these photos on June 9 when I lucked out and got to ride with a friend on his boat during the arrival of the fleet, which happens every year during the Rose Festival.


We slowly passed beneath the Steel Bridge.


As the antenna touched first one cross piece, then another, it serenaded us with a rhythmic tlang-a-lang-a-tlang. An eerie sound.


Here's a better view of the cross pieces. Shining bright, the sun changed the color of much of what I photographed, depending upon which way I faced.


We've crossed to the other side of the bridge.


I like this perspective.


We're south of the bridge now, heading downriver. Here you can see the Steel Bridge in the foreground with its upper level for vehicles, MAX, pedestrians and bicyclists. The lower level is for trains. The orange bridge you can just see is the Broadway Bridge, while the barely visible one beyond it is the arch of the Fremont Bridge.

Seen from the MAX Yellow Line, snaking rail cars along the east side of the Willamette River, heading north.

Saturday in Portland, the sun shone, the breeze blew, the temp chilled, and I rode the light rail train to get my flu shot, taking photos to my heart's delight. At this particular point in the ride, the train has crossed the Steel Bridge, heading east towards Interstate Avenue, then north on it.

Looking through ...

... the railing along the Steel Bridge towards the Pearl District in Northwest Portland. We were in a Zipcar, stopped by a bridge lift.

Light at the end of the tunnel ...

...let me explain. Besides things like family and fun thankfully taking up some of my blogging time in good ways lately, I've had some camera-to-computer downloading issues/frustrations and then additional uploading from computer to Flickr issues/frustations.

I had dealt with all of that pretty well and intended to spend a good deal of time Sunday, during the NASCAR race at Atlanta, working on a series of posts about one of several wonderful things I've been able to do in Portland recently, maybe the Dirty Dozen Brass Band at Jimmy Mak's Jazz Club or Michael Cully's Puppetry at the Oregon History Museum or Sharon Wortman's Bridge Walk involving the Morrison and Steel Bridges across the Willamette. I had a bounty of specials to choose from, as well as the unique every day things I notice all around town, until Sunday morning.

When I opened Honk, my precious little iBook, and then opened iPhoto, there was a message that read something like, "For iPhoto to run, the iLibrary needs to be updated," and I really only remember seeing OK highlighted as a choice, so I clicked on OK. In seconds all of my photos disappeared from the iPhoto Library, all 6992 of them. I sat here, stunned into silence.

To tell the truth, my calmness at this unreal turn of events totally shocked me. I didn't wail, holler, sob. I knew that I had many, many photos at Flickr already, so I accepted what had happened and then promptly downloaded my three full memory cards into Honk and started putting photos onto Flickr.

Now for the light at the end of the tunnel part of this tale. Today on the bus ride home, I talked as I often do with a young man who is a few years younger than my younger son. When I told him what had happened, he promptly said, "Why don't you use Finder and search for the jpg's?" So, I did. And I found gobs and gobs of photos. It will be some time before I know if I have found what disappeared on Sunday, but I'm some kind of hopeful! And blessed!

Random Santa Sightings

Saturday as I walked west on NW Everett, covering some ground until the bus came along to take me to the post office on NW Hoyt, I glimpsed two Santas up ahead, walking on the north sidewalk. They disappeared quickly. I couldn't catch up with them to get a photo. Hours later, after walking over the Broadway Bridge, eating lunch at Burgerville, and then walking toward the Steel Bridge, I spied three Santas crossing the street in front of me.


The man on your left wears sunglasses, the woman in the middle wears what appears to be red-and-white-striped tights beneath her Santa-style skirt, and the one on the right wears traditional wide, black Santa Claus belt.


After walking across the Steel Bridge, I sat down on a curb to get a better angle for a photo of it, and a Santa rode by on a bicycle--a lady Santa in a plaid coat. What's going on with these Santas here, there and everywhere, I wondered.


Once again, hours later as I waited at SW Washington and SW 3rd Avenue for the 15 bus, I noticed four--count them, four--Santas getting out of a parked car. (Sorry the photo's not any better.) Now I'm really curious, but it's getting late and cold, so I board the bus and head for home.


To my surprise, a bus buddy--that's what I call people I've struck up an accquaintance with, mostly on the ride home--got on at SW 5th and Washington. She'd been downtown shopping at Macy's and told me all about it. As we looked out the front of the bus when it stopped at Broadway, three more Santas crossed in front of us, going north. "What's with these Santas all over today?" she asked. Shocked that she'd seen Santas, too, I explained my chance encounters to her. We couldn't come up with an answer to our mystery.

We got off the bus, wished each other "Happy Birthday"--hers is next Tuesday, mine is Wednesday--and I continued on into Walgreens to empty my memory cards onto photo CDs. I shopped while the machine worked and overheard a very tall woman talking on her cell phone while looking a reindeer headbands with little blinking Christmas lights. Evidently she was about to join friends who had been in a pub crawl since noon, and she wanted to wear something funny and/or entertaining. I tucked that bit of information away in my mind.

Once I got home, I downloaded photos, put those other Morrison Bridge photos on the blog, then started reading comments on my blog and looking at those blogs. I came across a new one, Nicole, at The Path of a Modern Goddess. In exploring her posts, I discovered that she and her husband had met at a Santa Claus pub crawl--the light bulb atop my head came on!

Could that be the explanation? I couldn't find anything on a quick search of Google, so I stopped thinking about the Santas until tonight when I started working on my blog. I typed in more specific info on Google, and I found out that there indeed had been a Santa event of sorts in Portland yesterday, beginning at noon, complete with a set of instructions and a map. You can read about it here, but be forewarned, it is NOT meant to be a warm and fuzzy holiday event.

Still and all, I'm glad to have an explanation for those random Santa sightings. And I'm planning to be at this year's tuba concert--Tuba Christmas--weather permitting, at Pioneer Courthouse Square on Dec. 15; maybe I'll see a second wave of Santas.