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I get to go to Coronado this morning!
I get to go to Coronado this morning, enclave and island of the military and the overly wealthy here in San Diego. However, for the first time in my eighteen years here in San Diego, I’ll be taking the ferry. Usually I drive over the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge:
I don’t have a lot of pictures of downtown San Diego from Coronado, so that’s what I’m hoping to get this morning. Three of my favorite buildings downtown:
I’m going with the Pacific Photography Society, a meetup group. If you’re not familiar with meetup, it’s just a huge collection of groups of people all interested in the same thing. Picture extracurricular activities in school. We have almost 1,900 meetup groups just here in San Diego!
We are meeting on Harbor Drive, right across from the San Diego County Administration Building:
The County Administration Building is where I got married on October 30, 2008, while getting married was still legal.
Although Coronado Island once was an island, it is now a peninsula. The shallow marsh that once separated it from the southern mainland was filled in many decades ago and large condominium towers built there. I think someone from Clearwater, Florida, wanted to make the San Diego coastline look like their coastline. Didn’t work. The City got together and voted to limit the height of any buildings on Coronado Island. So the ten Coronado Shores condominium towers, built in the 1970s and each five stories tall (about 145 feet), will not have any company in the near future.
Gone…. no more…. dreams removed….
I’ve always been fascinated by bridges, perhaps since I grew up in the flatlands of Texas where bridges were few and far between. Spaghetti bowls on the interstate freeways don’t count. I’m talking real bridges that take you from here to there.
Two years ago when I went to the Sand Castle World Championships in Imperial Beach, California, I found an old railroad trestle through the marshland. I stopped to take pictures while the rest of the crowd I was walking with hustled on towards the beach.
While I was taking pictures I was also visualizing…. dreaming…. about the trains that used to traverse the tracks. I was dreaming of something like this:
I suspect my dream was bigger than what the railroad trestle could actually handle. Maybe something along the lines of this is more in line with reality:
The first train is the famous Union Pacific 844 which I chased through Southern California on November 17, 2011.
The second train is the #3 Mojave Northern 0-6-0T steam switch engine that worked in the northern Mojave desert in the early 20th Century.
Steam switch engines very well could have worked the south San Diego area where, at the time, there were various factories relating to salt production, fishing, and generating electricity.
When I went to the Sand Castle World Championships last year, the remainders of the old railroad trestle were gone…. no more…. dreams removed….
Sadly, after 37 years of hosting the Sand Castle World Championships, the Great Recession ended them. They also are gone…. no more…. dreams removed…
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Action at a railroad trestle
My youth was spent in Brigham City, Utah, and Kingsville, Texas. Both cities were hot beds of railroad action. Since my dad, granddad, and uncles worked for the railroad, I gathered an interest in them. Of course, I was also a little boy. What little boy doesn’t like the trains? Now I’m a 57-year-old boy who still likes trains.
When I was out train watching a few days ago, I found a railroad trestle that I had not seen before. Although the day was overcast, dull, dreary, and cold, I stuck around for a couple of hours taking pictures of all the action at the trestle….
Bird on a railroad trestle
Train on a railroad trestle
Side of a railroad trestle
Fishing under a railroad trestle
Walking the dogs under a railroad trestle
Walking the railroad trestle walkway
Walking the railroad trestle walkway
Walking the railroad trestle walkway
The end
Dog under a railroad trestle
Father and son action
Throughout history, railroad trestles have been popular. There’s just something nostalgic…. romantic? …. American? ….about them, as you can see by the action here in just a couple of hours.
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