2004 - what on earth was I thinking?

[railsquid]

Just going through some old trip photos to work out where I've been on various visits before I started living in Japan. Anyway it turns out I wasn't very interested in the trains themselves - I have mind-numbing amounts of pictures of useless stuff like decorated post boxes, funny signs and old decrepit buildings, but this is the total sum of the directly railway-related pictures:

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/129145651@N06/albums/72157670107735703

 

I'll have to go through and annotated them, but basically the first dozen represent around a week's worth of travel, first to the Kansai area then up to Hokkaido. Most of the rest are in the Tokyo area, apart from a quick trip to Minakami.

 

Not much of interest, though it seems I caught the 205/E233 transition on the Yamanote line and have some pictures of the Odakyu line around Shimokitazawa which show scenes no longer possible today.

 

In my defence, this was 2004 and the digital camera I had didn't have much in the way of storage, and I had no way of transferring them anywhere, so was limited in what I could take. I may have some old-fashioned analogue pictures too, and pretty sure I've got some video on tape too.

[TheNicofabi]

Must have been a pretty awsome Digital Camera thou from the quality of those pics, also to be honest if i ever was on a trip to somewhere i've not really gotten much pictures of trains either cause i never got close to any... only Police Cars mostly... (actually i think i only had that during the class trip to italy...)

[railsquid]

It wasn't bad for the time I bought it (2001? I certainly paid for it in DM), but the memory cards were sized in MB and the data connection was RS232. And it took about 20 seconds to power up. And it doesn't seem to have recorded the date in the EXIF data, though the photos are at least sorted by the date I downloaded them to a PC.

[JR 500系]

Wow!

 

Firstly, thank you for sharing your album squid! It was so nice to go through all the pictures...

 

I especially like this one:

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/129145651@N06/28781556444/in/album-72157670107735703/

 

The shot of the 400 series with the Sakura is just... Beautiful... Where might this location be by the way?

[bikkuri bahn]

Where might this location be by the way?

 

Let me butt in...It's in Yamagata, in front of the East entrance to the old Yamagata Castle. 

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.2551473,140.3310507,3a,75y,45.34h,90t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1s-ZEILeolz85M%2FV0lTUwwgIGI%2FAAAAAAAAaAw%2F8f0HT34yFjMEXSKSaV1q5vr4xyMg2uZMgCLIB!2e4!3e11!6s%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2F-ZEILeolz85M%2FV0lTUwwgIGI%2FAAAAAAAAaAw%2F8f0HT34yFjMEXSKSaV1q5vr4xyMg2uZMgCLIB%2Fw203-h101-n-k-no%2F!7i5376!8i2688

[railsquid]

Bingo. Pure luck I arrived when the cherry blossom eas in full swing.

[serotta1972]

More great pictures and those shots of the 400 and E3 are very nice!  Thanks again for sharing.

[tridentalx]

Fascinating. I stood at one of your locations - Yoyogi-Hashiman - only a couple of days ago.

[Das Steinkopf]

It's good to see that you are starting to beef up your Flickr account with a lot of photos of trains etc, as to the taking pictures of random stuff I think it's actually a good thing and very useful, most railfans will only take photo's of the trains and parts of the line but neglect the local landscape. I find taking photos of random things is especially useful when you are building a layout, you are able to capture details that most people would never think of and bring some form of authenticity to a layout and make some rather convincing scenes based on the local environment.

[railsquid]

The point is I was focussing way too little on the trains on those trips... Pity as I would probably have travelled on a lot of classic JNR stuff which is now gone. Anyway as I'm spending a lot of time stuck at home at the moment, it's a good opportunity to sort through all the photos I've collected. Most aren't technically very good but serve as a useful record.

[bikkuri bahn]

I almost exclusively take pictures of trains and the railway environment with my good camera. Snapshots are done with the cellphone. The reasoning is that the railway scene is much more rapidly changing than the general environment in developed countries. With limited resources and time on my hands, I'd rather record something that may be gone in five or ten years than things that will likely still be there in thirty.

[railsquid]

That reminds me, there was an interesting-looking brick-built (or at least brick-decorated) building which looked pretty old (for Japan) next to Hamamatsucho station, at some point in the last decade I spend a few minutes taking some photos in the expectation it would no longer be there one day... Went past the location today and guess what...