12 Responses

  1. dsalt says:

    I want to eat the cake…and some chicken as well.

    • Emily says:

      The cake was quite good… tasted like gingerbread. As for chicken, they did not have any of that. You always leave the most random comments on here. I don’t think any of my other readers know about how you cried for food while fasting.

  2. Jeremy says:

    Great photos! What a fine station…and a nice reminder of what a dump some of the MTA’s other stations are (Penn Station, for instance). Of course, the LIRR too had to “modernize”, and replace all its solari signs (though I thought Amtrak/NJT, upstairs in Penn, still has some sort of flip signs…not sure about that.) It’s a shame they’re taking out the one in NH, it seems to fit right in with the character of the place.

    • Eric R. says:

      The ones in the Amtrak concourse were replaced around 2000 with crappy LCD ones, which are mostly broken now.

      I never got CDOT’s reasoning for replacing the sign, because NJT has been putting up new ones recently.

      • Emily says:

        The reasoning they kept stating publicly was that the current board was not, and could not, be ADA compliant. I even went far enough to acquire a copy of the ADA compliance guidelines and refuted that assertion, but of course they never took the time to answer me back. I cc’ed the state rep (who I had noticed was commenting publicly on some of the articles) and she said that once CDOT decides something, it is practically impossible to get them to change their minds.

    • Emily says:

      We’re just lucky we still have Grand Central… and that it was saved before it could be taken down like the original Penn Station. Though losing one was probably an impetus for saving the other. But shit, we’ve got Madison Square Garden!

  3. Tyler Trahan says:

    Boston South Station used to have three Solari boards, which were replaced with one massive LED sign. It has speakers at the bottom that try and completely fail to reproduce the signature clicking sound of the real boards. The sound effect isn’t synced with the board actually changing, and sometimes it sticks and keeps looping the sound over and over again. Even at rush hour, the tables under the speakers are often empty.

    I enjoyed your photos from the event; that panorama image from the platform in particular is extremely impressive! Did you stitch it manually or use an automated program? I always encounter so many warping problems on panoramas that wide that I end up hand-stiching it and having SOMETHING looks obviously skewed or kinked.

    • Emily says:

      Thanks! For the panorama I used AutoStitch (http://cvlab.epfl.ch/~brown/autostitch/autostitch.html) which works pretty well. Photoshop’s stitching works okay, but it always tends to warp really badly in some spots like fences and powerlines. At times after running it I do have to fix some things by hand, the yellow safety strip on the platform always gets kinda messed up. It is probably easier to let the program do it and just fix the errors, than doing it all by hand. I don’t think I’ve done one by hand in forever… probably because they take forever :P

    • Emily says:

      Oh, and thanks for letting me know about the board in Boston. I had heard about it, but of course the MBTA claims they came up with the perfect solution with the sound and everything. Of course they’d paint a rosy picture of everything. :P

  4. Peter says:

    If you still need a Solari fix, head over to Secaucus, NJ:
    http://www.subwaynut.com/njt/secaucus/secaucus4.jpg

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