Month: December 2012

From this side, in late fall (or, if you prefer, early winter) this bridge resembles an abandoned industrial site more than anything else.

Keeping stonework clean in a city is a never-ending job, and a costly one.  Skirmishes are won here and there, but it’s a long war.

Stone arches; how I love them.

There are three transportation modes hidden in these pictures:  the bicycle/pedestrian trail on which Basil and I are standing; the river, upon which scullers and other passengers travel; and that dreaded horror, The Schuylkill, which is a highway.

If you look very closely, you can see the green directional sign in the open arch, hanging over the highway.

while in New York, I’m afraid, not actually on Basil.  For the first time in a long time, I ran about the city checking out the holiday lights.  All the stuff tourists check out, rather than New Yorkers.  First, the tree in Rockefeller Plaza, which I think I hadn’t seen since I was a small child.

It was big.  And bright.  But not precisely decorated.  Nonetheless, it was a cheery sight.

The plaza was lined with trumpeting angels.

A very small tree nearby, in the window of the Metropolitan Museum shop, was artfully contrived, with all the requisite frou-frou.

Blue lights and metallic flags ringed the area. For a minute, I thought I was at the UN Plaza.  (Well, not really.  But all those flags did create the association.)

I’m a sucker for white decorative lights. Why is that, do you suppose?  Perhaps because they are star-like?

I was in the city during Chanukkah, and saw many chanukkiahot, but didn’t feel comfortable photographing them.  Christmas in the USA is an almost exclusively secular affair, but a single, lit, chanukkia is still very much a religious symbol.  I enjoyed the candle lights (even the electric ones), but was not inspired to capture their images.

SEPTA, the beleaguered southeastern Pennsylvania rail system, has put some new cars — Silverliner V is the name — into service on some regional rail lines.  There’s more leg room than in the older cars, which means that there’s room for me, and Basil, in the space of my seat alone:

As I have short, small, legs, your mileage may vary.

Cars are generally in good shape on the line I ride most often, which is far from the city.  The new cars offer some improvements, though, specifically the automated station announcements, and the LED screens which show which station the train is next.  (Oddly, though, when the train is slowing, and in each station, the only thing the LED screen shows is the mightily unhelpful “SEPTA”.  That would be easy and cheap to remedy; the wonder is that anyone thought it was a good idea in the first place.)  SEPTA conductors, while often pleasant, are not known for their clarity of speech, or willingness to announce each station audibly.

There’s plenty of room for compact Basil, even in the standard seating areas.  There’s a different configuration on the Silverliner V, one I saw on a previous trip, with seating along the side of the car, rather than perpendicular to it.  That’s an even better place for a folding bicycle, especially if the train is full.  I don’t know if that’s on all Silverliner Vs — I may have missed that section of the car on this particular trip.

There’s been much speculation that the new cars will draw new riders.  I don’t know about that, but I wish SEPTA would reverse a change made a while ago, when they stopped using route numbers for the various train lines.  Now, new users can’t simply be told “take the R4 — (for Regional Rail, route 4) — but they must know the terminal points of whatever line they need, no matter how irrelevant to their own trip.  That was a move of supreme idiocy, and likely to make using the line much more difficult for both tourists, and inexperienced SEPTA riders alike.

The new cars, though, look like an improvement, for reals.