Sometimes successful photography depends on cultivating an eye for detail.
There are train chasing days where the action seems almost endless. One train whips by only to be followed by another. Nirvana. Almost. There are also days when the weather is not cooperating. The sun is consistently in the wrong spot and as you look at the back of your camera on what you captured, you can only come up with one word. “Blah.”
It happens. We’ve all been there. But instead of giving up, turn your interests elsewhere. If capturing a passing train just is not in the cards, consider scaling down and look at the details of railroading.
Back in the 1960s I was exploring Oregon logging railroad Valley & Siletz. It was my day off and as it turned out, it was V&S’s, too. I found an employee working in the engine house working on one of the General Electric 70-tonners and he gave me the green light to do a little photography. I leaned back and braced myself against something to get the only shot I could of the unit. Exciting? Probably not. But it makes for a good memory of a railroad that no longer exists.
The Motive Power builder’s plate was attached to a badly lit, nose dark Liquid Natural Gas switcher in a recycling yard in Anaheim, Calif. It might not be around tomorrow so I photographed what I could.
When working as a contract photographer for the Union Pacific in 2015, I rode with a Positive Train Control test train. One early morning in Guadalupe, Calif. I wanted to capture Manager of Terminal Operations John Wade before we departed south on the Coast Line back to Van Nuys, Calif. I moved John around to the light that was good on him with the badly lit train in the background.
In Independence, Calif., the band of volunteers of The Carson & Colorado Railway, a non-profit group dedicated to the restoration, preservation, and operation of Southern Pacific narrow gauge 4-6-0 No. 18 held a party in August 2016 for its official return to the living. The short piece of track it was on was under a series of trees in terrible light. Walking around the steamer trying to show it was now a hot piece of equipment again, I saw the fire underneath.
On the Stockton Terminal & Eastern in Stockton, Calif. I was waiting for a train that never came. I managed to salvage something from my wait by photographing a crossbuck that probably hadn’t seen a coat of paint since it was new.
In North Platte, Neb., photographing for the Union Pacific again, I spied a Cushman Utility Vehicle that had been put in the railroad’s colors that even had the company’s emblem on its nose. Looking at it I didn’t care what the light was, I had to take a picture.
The point is there are all sorts of odds and ends just waiting to be preserved by railroad photographers while waiting for a train that may, or may not come by. Good light or bad, capture them for posterity, the whimsy of the moment, or just because you want to.
As always David and very fine article and photo, I beleive DPM once wrote about the “detail” being as important as the train. Happy Christmas.