Via Scibling Corpus Callosum comes this story of a photographer arrested for taking this photo of an Amtrak train. . . in order to enter Amtrak's own "Picture Our Trains" contest. Uh, PR snafu, anyone?
This is especially annoying because it's been an ongoing problem in DC for some time. Tourists often take photos in Union Station - and often get harassed by guards for doing so, even though station reps have admitted it's not against the law. It's hard to say how taking photos like this one, from public areas, is a security risk - but if it is, Amtrak should get some kind of consistent policy in place. And not tell people to go take photos of their trains.
Picture source: photographer Duane Kerzic's website
- Log in to post comments
More like this
At least when it comes to transportation, it looks that way. The NY Times had an article yesterday about how cities are getting far less of the stimulus package slated for transportation. From The NY Times, here's the issue in a pretty figure:
(click to embiggen)
The problem--and I say this as a…
When I visited Shanghai a few years ago, one of my favorite moments was riding the maglev train from the airport to a Metro station on the outskirts of the city. As I recall, its speed got up to around 250 mph - a counter in each car displayed the speed, and the numbers changed in a blur as the…
When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn't because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually…
After the trip to my parents' for Christmas, I flew down to Charleston, SC to attend the Renaissance Weekend (though none of it fell on an actual weekend day...). This provided some much-needed stress relief, but was not great in photo-a-day terms, as it's a strictly off the record event, so I…
This kind of shit is just fucked on so many levels. The bottom line is that it is nothing more than a manifestation of authoritarianism purely for authoritarianism's sake, without even the pretense of a genuine purpose. This shit makes me want to fucking puke.
The right hand is saying "look out for suspicious activity!" while the left hand is saying "Picture Our Trains!" Unfortunate and kind of dumb. I wonder how it would work in Britain, with the phalanxes of trainspotters at every station? They'd need BUSSES to round up the perps.