A Slow Train Home

7 March

Even though there were five inches of snow on the ground on Monday morning I went into work. The rest of the lab was stuck in a series of airports coming home from a meeting. Penn was a ghost town that day.

On the way into work I caught a shot of this red-tail hawk hanging out by the tracks at the Trenton train station. Its back was towards me and I was shooting through a train window, but here it is anyway:



The lab is in the John Morgan Building, an old stone thing just behind the Quad, Penn's biggest dorm. I liked how the snow was slumping on the roof around a window:



The train platform was pretty much empty when I boarded my usual train. Of the three people I usually sit with on the way home, only one was there: Linda, who works at Drexel.

There was still enough daylight to look at the city in the snow. The train's engine was having trouble and could only go 40 mph. That gave us a lot of time to look at the graffiti. There's a lot of it along the Northeast Corridor tracks north of the city. There's a lot that's colorful and artistic, too. I tried to get a picture but, even at our slow speed, we were going too fast. All those signatures against the snow looked pretty snazzy, though.

A few times we slowed to a crawl. We passed a lot full of old cars covered in snow. Linda said she liked the contrast. "I see art everywhere," she added. I took a picture because I could. We were hardly moving anyway. I think we were somewhere near Bridesburg at this point:





Linda's stop is Cornwells Heights, so she missed this scene from the Bristol station, tire tracks in the parking lot snow. It kinda looks like trees.