Yesterday, January 20, 2022 (01-20-2022), Conway Scenic Railroad operated its first plow extra of the season.

This resulted in the vintage Russell Plow being readied for the service it was built for. The extra was needed help clear flangeways of snow and ice accumulation, push back mounds of hardened snow, and to serve as an equipment refresher and training excercise for our crews.

I made this series of photos of the plow and GP35 216 using my Nikon Z6 mirrorless camera with 24-70mm zoom lens. For this I set the exposure mode to ‘A’ (for automatic/aperture priority), manually dialed in ‘+1/3 stops’ to help compensate for the bright snow, and controlled the aperture manually.

The bright snow conditions tend to result in underexposed railroad images because the camera meter treats the snow as gray rather than white. Thus the need for slight overexposure.

I made some nominal corrections to the camera’s NEF files using Lightroom and converted to moderate size JPGs for internet presentation here.

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