Testing 1-2-3

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After nearly three years of construction, the Portland Streetcar is set to begin running on the East side of the Willamette River this Fall. Several times in the past couple weeks I’ve noticed teams of engineers performing tests using one of the new vehicles, and today I decided to stop and snap a few pictures. You’ll need to look carefully at these images, to determine whether the train was moving past me, or vice-versa.

These new trains were “Made in the USA” by United Streetcar, using a nearly identical design to earlier cars in the fleet that were built in the Czech Republic. At Fat Pencil Studio, we have our own digital version of a streetcar-- a simplified version of Seattle’s South Lake Union Streetcar, originally modeled and shared on the 3d Warehouse by SketchUp user JediCharles.

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Joshua Cohen is a Principal at Fat Pencil Studio