CSXT 1543 and Chessie System Caboose at Evansville, IN…

November 4, 2017 – I’m amazed by what the camera can see that the eye doesn’t! When I pulled up to this spot with fellow railfan Ryan Scott, we both looked at the scene and man it’s dark!! I love how my full frame sensor captured all the ambient light and how it turned the slow moving clouds into almost what looks like the aurora borealis in some ways!!!

Here we see a CSXT 1543, a GP-15, tied to Chessie System Caboose 904138 on the City Lead that runs along next to Ohio Street in Evansville, Indiana. The set is used to work the industrial area around Berry Plastics and the caboose is used as the shoving platform.

ISO 100 for 30 seconds at f/6.3 with a Nikon 18mm lens on a Nikon D800.

Reflections on a night shoot at Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum

September 9, 2017 – This is a shot of the first organized night photoshoot I’ve done on a train related subject other than my own. It was great! The photographer standing next to the light stand is Norfolk Southern Photographer Casey Thomason who did the lighting for the Railfest night shoot event and helped to make it happen with the support and help of the fine folks at the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum in Chattanooga, TN. Outstanding job by all!

What’s pictured here is a small portion of the photographers that participated in the event where we shot several different views of Southern Railway diesel locomotives 5000, 3170, 2594 with a freight train and a Tennessee Alabama & Georgia Railway passenger train on the Chickamauga Creek bridge at the TVRM museum.

While everyone jockeyed around for space, for their version of the “perfect shot,” the event got underway about 9pm and it was close to midnight before everyone went their merry way after we did many rotations of the front line of photographers getting their chance for a clear shot.

This photograph I shot hand held, as I was letting a friend that wasn’t aware there was a night shoot during Railfest, use my tripod on the rotations. Casey was doing a 3 second countdown before firing the flashes and so I timed my exposure to start at the 1 second mark which opened my shutter right as the flash went off. Exposure was 1 second at f/8 at ISO 800 on my Nikon D800 at 42 mm on my Sigma 24-70mm lens and shot as a RAW file. 

NS Yard, National Train Day, Princeton, Indiana

May 13, 2017 – A eerie quiet fell in amongst all these steel horses as they sat at the north end of the Norfolk Southern yard at Princeton, Indiana as the last light of dusk fell on National Train Day. I drove from Piqua, Ohio to Princeton, Indiana on this day looking for trains to catch and I saw three moving along the way, all in the distance. That’s the way it goes sometimes! I did catch another shot I’ll post later of a CSX coal train in the loop at Alliance Coal.