December 2005.
It was nearing the end of Irish Rail’s final beet season, which ironically turned out to be one of the busiest campaigns.
Toward the end of the day, my friends and I had positioned ourselves near milepost 90 on the South Wexford line at the top of Taylorstown Bank on the climb up from Wellingtonbridge.
Irish class 071 number 073 was lifting an estimated 775 tonnes of sugar beet and had been in run-8 for several minutes; the roar of its 12-645E3 diesel drowning out the sounds of birds and sheep in the surrounding fields.
The train was at a crawl when it reached the top of the grade. I made a sequence of photos using three cameras. This was made with my N90S with a 400mm Tokina lens fitted to a Manfrotto tripod.
Exposed on Fujichrome, scan adjusted for color, contrast and sharpness in post-processing. My intent was to exaggerate the effect of the gradient on Taylorstown Bank. There aren’t many places on Irish Rail where a 400mm lens is really effective, but this is one of them.
I felt that the 400mm view was the trickiest to pull off, and honestly I considered this among my experimental attempts, as I fired of a whole series of images in rapid succession. I made a more conventional view as the train got closer.
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