Category: Greenway

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Train Crossing the Midtown Greenway

I love the network of trails in Minneapolis! The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy tries to convert abandoned railroad right-of-ways to trails, but here in Minneapolis the trails share them. Around mid-morning, the trains are very active as the cross-country trains come in and the trans-yard trains begin the daily shuffle. This guy is from the Twin Cities and Western (TC&W), the morning train usually has three engines, which isn't that interesting, but I looked up their website and found that they only have eight of them, so it's almost half of all their motive power.  It's fun being a geek in the land of infinite information... I love summer on the prairie...

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Martin Sabo Bridge on The Midtown Greenway

Early Morning bike ride on the Midtown Greenway. With all this beautiful weather, I've been getting out on the bike a lot more. I bought a small Point & Shoot camera that I can bring with me. I took this one with it and hopefully I'll have more for you soon. Hauling the big camera around on the bike is a lot of work and potentially damaging to it — lots of mechanical parts in there I'd hate to vibrate to death.  This bridge looks great at night too!

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Beehive Fireplace, Lilac Park

A few years ago I walked down to the sad little stone construction I noticed on my way to and from work. It was some form of fireplace, sadly left in the middle of a dangerous cloverleaf along highway 100 at 7. Recently this relic, which I've found out to be a Beehive Fireplace, has found a new home and has been lovingly restored. It's been moved a short distance to a new park called Lilac Park, just off the Midtown Greenway Bike Trail at Highway 100.   There's trail access, a handicap accessible bathroom and a few of the original picnic tables from when Hwy 100 was Lilac Way. It was constructed as a parkway and was the largest WPA project in the state. The Golden Valley Garden Club planted Lilacs along the parkway. Also, I just discovered the Nordic Ware tower right next to the park was "the first circular concrete grain elevator in the United States, and possibly in the world."

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Greenway Bridge Repair

A little end-of-season bridge repair. The old railroad bridges that now support the Greenway bike trail through Uptown have been crumbling over the years; finally their turn has come up for repair. Fisheye!

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Sunrise over the Greenway

Sunlight filters through over the Greenway Bike Trail bridge near Lake of the Isles.

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Infrared Greenway Bike Trail in Minneapolis

Here's yesterday's location, only in infrared. I keep forgetting that I can do this. I waited all winter for the bright green foliage of summer so that I could take my infrared camera out. As you can see from these two photos, the foliage reflects infrared light so they appear as crystal white masses. The sky goes black and the clouds go white. There are special cameras for taking infrared, but a lot of point-and-shoots can do it. I'm using a Sony F828 for this. If your P&S has a "night mode", then it probably does a decent job of infrared. The easy way to test it is to point your TV remote at the camera lens and push a button. If you see a light coming from the remote on the screen, your camera see IR. Then you need a filter. Light colors are measured in wavelengths and the filters are numbered accordingly, 720nm, 820nm and 1000nm are the common ones. The first two do a good job, the 1000nm is hard to work with, with so little light, you need a tripod. If y'all like these, I'll take some more...

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Minneapolis Greenway Bridge Part Two

This is an additional picture of the Minneapolis Midtown Greenway Bridge. I spent some more time cranking the color balance around to get this bridge to match the Guthrie Theater colors (also known as Best Buy or Ikea colors). Minneapolis Metro Blog just featured my Greenway pictures on their site.

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Minneapolis Midtown Greenway Bridge

The Minneapolis Midtown Greenway Bridge is now open to the public! It's true, I went to the Grand Opening Ceremony last night. The mayor was there as well as all the officials that made this impressive bridge possible. It's unique in that on the side opposite of the cable stay tower is a light rail line and a power transmission line. The bridge actually threads between them. It's something to see, but not at night. I got up early this morning to go down and take these pictures. When the ceremony was over last night, it was too gray and dark to take any good pics, and since I biked over, I didn't bring the tripod for a proper night shot. I choked up the aperture to f9 at 15 seconds. I put the white balance at 5100k to get the car lights white and the bridge lights are actually blue. Noise reduction really helps the black, and yes, I like the lens flare very much, thank you. The bridge connects two trails making it possible for me (and anyone else, God I'm self-involved) to bike from my neighborhood — Uptown, Minneapolis, MN all the way to the Mississippi river on trails. The trail system in this town is pretty impressive, ONE can bike all around the cities on trails. I regularly bike to St. Paul and back on trails, a round trip of forty miles. Mayor Rybak said last night that Minneapolis is the second most biked city in the country. Lean more about the bridge and the event at the Star Tribune So hooray for Minneapolis, enjoy the new bridge and river access, I'm going back to bed. Here's the far side of the bridge — not many pictures of this bridge include the far side because it isn't that interesting. It's mostly a ramp. The cool big cable tower is there to hold everything up, because there's no room on the other side. The bridge goes over the light rail tracks and under the big powerlines.