In the summer of 1996, we borrowed a mechanically unstable RV from the in-laws and the six of us went on a six week jaunt across the country leaving a trail of parts along the way. One of the goals of the trip was to stop at operating railroads and museums along the way. The trip took us from Los Angeles to the Black Hills, east all the way to West Point NY, south to Washington DC, west to West Virginia, south again to Huntsville, north into Indiana, west again to Colorado Springs, north to Boulder, west again into Utah and eventually back to LA. We visited these railroad sites:

• Operating Tourist Railroads
  • Cass
  • Pike's Peak Cog Railway
  • Georgetown Loop RR
• Museums
  • The Illinois Railroad Museum
  • Steamtown National Park
  • A museum in Roanoke
  • A museum in Huntsville
  • The Colorado Railroad Museum

I took worthwhile video only at the operating railroads which can be found in the table below.

These videos were shot on an old Sony 8 mm analog camcorder and eventually transcribed into DV format with the use of a newer Sony mini-DV camcorder in analog pass through mode. The video was saved as an iMovie project and then exported to .mov files in h.264 format. The original camera didn't have a lot of video resolution so that 320x240 videos show about all the detail that there is to see on the original videos.

You'll have to pardon the shaky video in spots, the cameraman was often distracted by his small children moving about.

The movie files are stored in Apple's QuickTime video h.264 format. If your computer can't handle QuickTime or h.264 now, you can get it for most versions of Windows or the MacOS at:

This page has been accessed times since 26 Apr 09.

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© 2009 George Schreyer
Created Apr 26, 2009
Last Updated April 26, 2009