transportation security paranoia

A few seconds after the writer took this photo at the main train station in Lisbon, Portugal in 2007, a security guard came running out of an office on the concourse proclaiming, "No photos!  It is for security reasons!"  One can understand their sensitivity given the Muslim terrorist atrocities at Madrid's main railway station in 2004, but it is hard to see how a picture of a train is going to make any difference at all to these terrorists' plans.

Apparently in the US, things have become even worse.  The Washington Post last 17 December, in connection with the new Airport fully revealing X-rays, pointed out that the Transportation Security Administration had not caught a single terrorist suspect in its history; the FBI and local law enforcement had caught most of them.  But the latter can be overzealous too. Writing in the latest issue of Trains magazine, columnist Don Phillips reports that an editor of another railway magazine and a contributor were actually arrested by New York policemen on a subway station platform while waiting to photograph a historic train run by the New York Transit Museum.  Needless to say, the judge threw the case out, but the pair are suing the police for wrongful arrest.

Phillips also reports that Amtrak has become tired of the US Customs and Border Protection hassling passengers on its trains that run within 100 miles (160 km) of the US borders.  In particular on the Lake Shore Limited (which runs entirely within the US), Border Patrol agents routinely board the train in the middle of the night, often east of Buffalo, NY, waking up passengers indiscriminately and questioning them - and they expect that train to stay stopped until they have finished.

All this trouble is caused by a minority of agents and officers who don't use their brains and want to be fools.  But it is something that innocent transport enthusiasts need to be mindful of when wanting to take pictures in some locations in some countries.