A weekend in Charlotte NC and a ride on the LYNX (II)

[WMAveteran]

I spent the past weekend in Charlotte NC travelling on Amtrak #79 & #80 - The Carolinian - boarding at Union Station in Washington DC. The trip is a little over 9 hours normally but the trip south was almost 2 hours late because of a CSX slow order due to excessive temperatures that effected the welded rail and a stop for a passenger's medical emergency in Mebane NC. Ironically, the day before in almost the exact same spot, in Mebane, The Piedmont struck a tractor trailer that was stuck at a grade crossing and I understand the locomotive was destroyed. The part of the trip over Norfolk Southern tracks did not appear to have a slow order (except for Mebane) but the damage was done by then. The return northbound trip was uneventful but was 30 minutes late.

The LYNX Blue Line is 9.6 miles long with 15 stations. The fares are cheap ($1.50 one way and $3.00 round trip) and the trains run 7 days a week. The system even provides brochures that describe the art in each station! The LRVs "include a unique seating fabric and ceiling art that continues the corridor thematic focus on Charlotte's tree canopy and the changing seasons."

This site wouldn't upload my photos (apparently they are too large and I cannot find a way to decrease the size) but the same post with photos does appear on btco.net.  Sorry.

[aznboy4305]

Try uploading your images to www.imageshack.us , there is a feature that lets you resize your images as you upload them.

[Sand Box John]

Picasa Web Albums also make available multiple image sizes for posting elsewhere.

Here are the photo i took of LYNX light rail on 12 01 2007.

[Tristan]

We can't get one-upped by Baltimore!  I removed all limits on attachment filesize to see if that fixes the problem (it was previously set for 8 MB total over up to 10 attachments). 

[WMAveteran]

Thank you Tristan, Aznboy and Sand Box John.  The site would still not upload my photos (each one is 2 MB) so I went to imageshack and resized them.  I hope this works, so here goes:

[Tristan]

I've gotta tweak the server-side settings for upload limits too, I guess.

[Sand Box John]

WMAveteran
Thank you Tristan, Aznboy and Sand Box John.  The site would still not upload my photos (each one is 2 MB) so I went to imageshack and resized them.

What you need to do is resize and compress the raw images you intend to publish to the web with an image editing program such as IrfanView.  Then upload them to your hosting server and post the links. I upload my pictures at 1024 X 681 compressed to 65% and post the link to the 800 X 532 image generated by the hosting server. The uploaded 1024 X 681 images range in size from 85 kb to 175 kb. The resized and compressed images are saved to a separate directory for uploading, the raw images are left unchanged so I can catalog my raw images and burn them to CDs and DVDs.

Even if you chose to post them as attachments that will be hosted here, by resizing and compressing them you will save disk space and band width by posting 85 kb to 175 kb files compared to the 2 mb raw images.