Amtrak 122 in Salem Acrylic Print

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Amtrak train #14, the northbound Coast Starlight, stops briefly at the Salem, Oregon station on November 2nd, 2006. The school bus must wait until the passengers are safely aboard. I shot the photo from a pedestrian overpass. Later that evening this train would turn around in Seattle and head south the next day, when I would board it to return home to Monterey.

By pure coincidence, the locomotive number is 122, while the school bus number is 221.

I almost didn't get this picture. Minutes earlier it was pouring rain, and it started to rain heavily again within a minute or two of the train's departure.

Photo Copyright James Toy.

In the fall of 1959, Mr. Toy entered this world at a place called Carmel on California's Monterey Peninsula. Nine years later his family pulled up stakes for the rain-soaked city of Salem, Oregon where he never quite fit in. When he was 12, he and his mother viewed an exhibit of photographs by a Salem newspaper photographer, which inspired him to take his first photography class. During his teenage years he gradually developed his eye for composition and his skills with light and exposure. Though he did not pursue photography as a career, he has continued to document his observations of the world on small frames of film. In 1984, Mr. Toy and his wife Heidi returned to the Monterey Peninsula where his heart belonged. In 1997, on a bit of...