It was a fine evening at Carpenters (the little cemetery situated near the Strasburg Rail Road crossing of Blackhorse Road).

Kris and our puppy Seamus waited in the car as I set up for Strasburg’s return run from Leaman Place.

Cows populated the fields on both sides of the line. My challenge was that as the laboring locomotive approached, the cows in the field to the left of the line became wary of the noise and began to migrate away from the tracks.

Working with my Nikon Z7-II with 70-200mm zoom, I composed this series of images as engine 475 worked its way west. Leading is engine 475, a former Norfolk & Western 4-8-0—a type sometimes described as a ‘Mastodon.’ It is among the locomotives featured in my new book ‘Steam by the Numbers’.

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