This arcane device, that looks like a piece of farming equipment, perhaps a remote control for a tractor, from the science-fiction decade of the 60s. Actually it’s contemporary, and this actual piece is in use currently in a part of my neighborhood being developed. It’s used to drill a hole in the ground, into which some dynamite is dropped. Then everyone runs like hell, jumps behind a dump truck in the nick of time, and dirt and rocks spray up into the air for 500 feet in all directions. I actually don’t know what happens, but I do know that this is what they use to drill down, and there is an air horn on top that lets out a pitiful little bleep, which I can sometimes hear from my house, and then muffled [boom]. I think the explosion is under ground, maybe it pulverizes the rock. But who cares. I like machines of all kinds, the more complicated the better.

I made it look retro-black-and-white to play up the fact that it looks like an antique. First I applied an HDR filter in PaintFX, then layered on some lighting effects and a black and white filter in PhotoToaster. It pays off being patient with image editing, even a devoted iPhoneographer might have to use several different apps to get the effects that the picture is asking for.

The North Carolina Museum of Transportation is tucked into a remote corner of Asheboro and really deserves more visitors and attention that it gets. If you like trains, this is a major destination. The place is packed with railroad cars and engines in a huge roundhouse with a working turntable to hook them up. My favorite engine was this one, that looked like something worthy of pulling the Hogwarts train, or the Polar Express.

Closeup of wheels on one of the engines from the NC Museum of Transportation. I could have spent hours there getting unusual angles on these old railroad engines, and happily so, but alas, the modern world impinged. I caught some good shots though, and will come back to these and do more to play up an old technology so different from what we see today. What happened to this mode of transportation? Now every household has at least one auto per adult, and sometimes more. We take our cars everywhere, think nothing of driving by ourselves when we could easily arrange car-pooling or shared rides or even just saving up errands for all at once. Maybe Uber and other ride-sharing services are the trains of today.