Photos concerning the bridge of the Hillsborough River have been moved to a previous post. This post now concentrates on the street running through Tampa.
This spur through town serves a tanker transloading facility, a chemical plant, Standard Concrete Products and Motiva Enterprises (a distributor of Shell and 76). It looks like some of the industry along the bay has already disappeared.
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(I don't understand why railfans have so much "just horn" time at the beginning of their videos. You can finally see the train at 2:18. There is a lot of horn blowing because the train is crossing a lot of streets in downtown Tampa. The city wants an exemption for the horn blowing, but it runs down the middle of Polk Street. I don't know if the train can control the traffic lights like the emergency vehicles can in Downers Grove, but there is still a matter of warning the cars that are driving on Polk Street that they might get run over. When I stayed in a hotel in downtown Atlanta, I would wake up in the wee hours of the morning because there was a crossing in an industrial part of town. And the engineer used no judgement as to how long a "long" blast needed to be. He leaned on that horn as if he was in the middle of the country approaching a blind crossing. If they won't give an exemption for a seldom used crossing in the guts of an industrial area, then they can't give one for street running in a downtown area.)
You can tell that it has rolled back just halfway. This bridge could go straight up. That is why the counterweights hang outside of the track girders.
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(I don't understand why railfans have so much "just horn" time at the beginning of their videos. You can finally see the train at 2:18. There is a lot of horn blowing because the train is crossing a lot of streets in downtown Tampa. The city wants an exemption for the horn blowing, but it runs down the middle of Polk Street. I don't know if the train can control the traffic lights like the emergency vehicles can in Downers Grove, but there is still a matter of warning the cars that are driving on Polk Street that they might get run over. When I stayed in a hotel in downtown Atlanta, I would wake up in the wee hours of the morning because there was a crossing in an industrial part of town. And the engineer used no judgement as to how long a "long" blast needed to be. He leaned on that horn as if he was in the middle of the country approaching a blind crossing. If they won't give an exemption for a seldom used crossing in the guts of an industrial area, then they can't give one for street running in a downtown area.)
You can tell that it has rolled back just halfway. This bridge could go straight up. That is why the counterweights hang outside of the track girders.
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The street running we hear at the beginning of the above video is down Polk Street. Here is a view taken from the Franklin Street crossing looking Westish. On the other side of that parking garage at the end of Polk is the location of the bridge.
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Then I turned around and took this view looking Eastish.
We then walked down Polk to the Marion Street crossing, and I again took pictures looking Westish and...
...Eastish. You can see that it runs several blocks through downtown. It leaves Polk Street at Jefferson Street.
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Tampa! This is a hard catch! Only 2 trips a week!
And then YouTube will offer you other videos of Tampa street running. This one shows it runs a lot of red lights.
We then walked down Polk to the Marion Street crossing, and I again took pictures looking Westish and...
...Eastish. You can see that it runs several blocks through downtown. It leaves Polk Street at Jefferson Street.
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Tampa! This is a hard catch! Only 2 trips a week!
And then YouTube will offer you other videos of Tampa street running. This one shows it runs a lot of red lights.
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