Recorded these timelapses of the trip I took a month or so ago on the Coastal Starlight (fancy name for a pretty mundane train) to Seattle to go to PAX West.
Pete's amazing google maps thing reminded me I had already done these and put them up but forgotten about them. I'm terrible about remembering to put these sorts of videos and such up I find the process of getting things edited etc somewhat tedious. These didn't require much as it was just stringing the files together trimming some of the night sections where there's nowt happening (maybe could use some more trimming there although on the return section there was the exciting fire sections that got captured while I was sleeping) slapping some royalty free music on it with the youtube app.
Trip Out:
Trip Back:
Comments
Those are really cool. I found the second one easier to watch - perhaps something to do with the camera angle? Things stuck on the screen for longer. It's amazing how wild so much of that is.
yeah getting the angle was tricky the camera (a dji action 2 a weird little modular action cam) has a pretty wide field of view but a pretty small screen for checking and of course on the way out it was dark so working out what the view would be like was hard. Once it's setup don't really want to mess with the thing. You're also facing different ways on the train out and in, outbound the camera is facing towards the coast and back it's inland
Given the trip is 24hrs but the day portion is quite different you're getting different sections on the way back a lot of the blank empty forest stuff was at night time although that did mean the massive forest fire we passed (time codes about 7:28) looked pretty impressive
Also those trains are filthy on the outside (somewhat cleaner on the inside) a layer of mud all over the windows makes for sub optimal pictures.
The remoteness surprised me too there's a section in the middle of the trip going through Oregon where it's all trees as far as you can see on either side no towns or stops and cell coverage drops out completely for several hours. Living in the bay area I often forget how spread out and empty a lot of the states is.
Oh, it's forest fires! I assumed the orange glow was a city behind a hill. Fair play.
Fish and I definitely got a sense of "fuck all here" when we drove across it in 1999!