Nine years ago, my Irish friends and I were exploring railway operations in Germany’s scenic Mosel Valley.
I made this view from the wall in a vineyard of a DB freight heading northward (eastward) toward Koblenz.
While not as busy as the Rhein Valley, there are endless perspectives on the railway in the Mosel Valley and we were certainly entertained by a continuous parade of freight and passenger trains.
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The Dublin & Kingstown was among the oldest railways in the world. This opened between its name sake points in 1834 and is considered the first steam railway in Ireland. The route is now part of Irish Rail’s network and was electrified in the early 1980s for the DART suburban service.
On August 30, 2016, I’d traveled from Dublin to Blackrock on the DART electrified suburban service to meet my friends. Working with my Fuji XT-1, I made this trailing photo from the footbridge on the south side of the station of a northward 29000-series CAF diesel railcar.
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On this day in 2015, I’d just arrived in Helsinki, Finland. I’d flown SAS from Dublin via Copenhagen. It was raining lightly as I walked around in the blue glow of dusk.
I made this photo on a brightly lit street in the central part of the city, not far from the famous Helsinki Central Station.
The next morning, I traveled on VR Group Pendolino tilting train to Oulu to meet my friend Markku for a week of rail-photography.
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On this day four years ago, I was on my way from the Bonn/Köln Flughafen to Boppard, Germany, I changed trains at the Koblenz Hbf.
During the interval between trains, I made this series of photographs with my FujiFilm XT1.
To improve upon the flat lighting, using Adobe Lightroom, I made minor adjustments to contrast, color temperature, and color saturation.
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On the afternoon of September 4, 2015, I made this photo with my FujiFilm XT1 of double-headed Class 189 electrics leading a loaded iron ore train through a vineyard near Klotten, Germany in the Mosel Valley.
This was on a week long visit to Germany with my Irish friends. We scored numerous excellent locations while exploring the Mosel and Rhein Valleys.
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On September 16, 2019, I was traveling in Germany with my old pal T.S.H.
We’d set up north of Boppard along the River Rhein to photograph the morning parade of trains on the busy ‘Left Bank’ route.
For these photos I borrowed T.S.H.’s 50-140mm Fujinon zoom and fixed it to my Fujifilm XT1 as a test.
These images are scaled from the in-camera Fuji JPGsmade with the camera’s Velvia color profile. These files have not been adjusted in post-processing.
Both images are trailing views of northward train IC 2226 that were exposed from the same vantage point. The first has the zoom set at 50mm, while the second has the zoom set at 140mm.
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On my July 2015 visit to Finland, my host Markku Pulkkinen did an excellent job of finding interesting railway subjects.
Early in the morning on July 26, 2015, we set up on the outskirts of Oulu to catch VR T5220, a freight forwarding iron ore mined in Russia to a Finnish plant. The freight wagons were Russian, the locomotive is a VR Group class Sr2 electric of Swiss design.
I had just purchased my first Adobe Lightroom for my then-new Apple MacBook Pro and was beginning to learn how to use this tool to make the most of my Fuji RAW files.
This was a revelation as the programs sliders made it easy to make adjustments to shadow and highlight detail, as well as color temperature and color balance corrections, which help make for much better photos when used judiciously.
I’m now working with a more advanced version of Lightroom with this I created two JPGs created from the Fuji RAW file. The top was scaled without any adjustements; the bottom reflects adjustments to color temperature, saturation, plus highlight and shadow area changes. Notice the difference in the detail to the sky.
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On this day three years ago, photographer Denis McCabe and I wandered the narrow streets of Lisbon, Portugal.
I used my Fuji XT1 to make this portrait oriented view of a classic tram navigating a steep narrow street.
Last night I imported the Fuji camera RAW file into Iridient for conversion to DNG format and then imported the DNG file into Adobe Lightroom for minor adjustments tothe color, constrast and exposure in order to make the most of the camera sensor.
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Five years ago, photographers Stephen Hirsch, Denis McCabe and I visited the cliffs at Downhill, Co. Derry in Northern Ireland to photograph NI Railways running along the beach.
These cliffs offer one of the most spectacular views of the railway in Ireland.
I made this image using my FujiFilm XT1.
This morning, I interpreted the Fuji camera RAW file using Adobe Lightroom for presentation here.
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August 23, 2016, I made this bright morning view of a short southward New England Central freight at Stafford Springs, Connecticut.
The attraction was the single GP38 wearing the classing blue and gold paint in rich morning sun.
Over the years, I’d photographed trains in Stafford Springs (Stafford on the railroad) from many angles. On this morning, I was pleased to get this view without any automobiles in the way of the train, and feature the row of brick buildings behind the tracks.
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I made these images the other night when Kris & I were photographing the St Lawrence & Atlantic’s westward road freight (train 393).
Night photography isn’t easy, or straight forward.
There’s a variety of approaches.
These images were exposed during the last hints of daylight.
To capture the train in motion in very low light I used a ‘secret combination’: a telephoto with a wide maximum aperture and a high ISO setting on the camera.
The telephoto minimizes the relative movement of the train to the camera sensor; the wide aperture lets in greater amounts of light and thus allows for a faster shutter speed. Likewise, the higher ISO also contributes to using a faster shutter speed.
However, the real secret was exposing manually, taking into account of the very bright headlights relative to the over all scene, while taking a position relatively off axis to the headlights to avoid the very bright lights directly hitting the front element of the lens.
FujiFilm XT1 with f2.0 90mm lens, camera set to ISO 3200 and 1/60th of a second.
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Bridge inspecting has taken me to new vantage points on the old Maine Central Mountain Division: angles that few visitors will ever get to see.
Accompanying Wayne Duffett of TEC Associates has opened my eyes to bridges and the spaces below them.
Working with my FujiFilm XT1, I made these digital images of the old Maine Central on a recent bridge inspection west of Bartlett.
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Yesterday (Sunday February 21, 2021) a clear blue dome made for excellent winter photographic conditions.
Kris Sabbatino and I went out to picture Conway Scenic’s afternoon Snow Trains.
We caught the 3pm departure passing Glen, New Hampshire.
After exposing a few Provia 100F color slides of the train crossing the truss bridge over the Ellis River, I made this view with my FujiFilm XT1 as the westward train approached the grade crossing.
I’ve presented two versions. The first is the camera-JPG using the Fuji Veliva color profile. The second is a JPG made from the camera-RAW, which I first converted using Iridient X-Transformer to a DNG file, then working in Adobe Lightroom I made very slight adjustments to the highlights and shadows to maximize the detail in the image while retaining the color profile.
Notice the difference in the amount of highlight detail in the snow, particularly to the left of the train. Also notice the tint of the green paint on the front of locomotive 216.
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Reading & Northern’s 4-6-2 Pacific #425 was the draw.
In December 2014, this handsome steam locomotives was operating a series of holiday trips on the old Reading Company lines out of Port Clinton, Pennsylvania.
Pat Yough offered to drive and so I traveled down by train to meet him and make photographs.
At the time, I was keen on investigating the FujiFIlm X-series mirrorless cameras as my next avenue for digital photography, so Pat lent me his Fuji XT1 to try out.
In addition, on that day I was also working with my Lumix LX7 and Canon 7D cameras.
We arrived at Port Clinton in the morning in time to catch 425 making some switching moves in preparation for its run up to Schuylkill Haven.
Overall, I was extremely impressed by the Fujifilm camera that day and a month later I invested in one.
The territory served by the old Reading Company also impressed me, and I’ve chosen this area as the setting for the model railroad that my girlfriend Kris Sabbatino and I are building.
Recently, Kris, impressed by my results with the Fuji X-series has invested in a Fuji XT4.
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On this day four years ago, I re-visited the former Southern Pacific crossing the Tehachapi mountains.
At Walong, popularly described as the ‘Tehachapi Loop’—where in the 1870s SP’s chief engineer William Hood applied this spiral arrangement to gain elevation while maintaining a steady gradient—I photographed this BNSF eastward intermodal train. (train direction is by timetable, not the compass.)
Working with my FujiFilm XT1 fitted with an 18-135mm Fujinon zoom, I made this photograph with the lens set to 21.6mm in order to take in most of the helical track arrangement. Exposure was f8 at 1/500 of a second at 200 ISO.
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Maine.
South Paris, Maine.
There’s no Eiffel tower here. Not a big one anyway.
I exposed these photos digitally using my FujiFilm XT1 with Fujinon 18-135mm lens.
The railroad is operated by Genesee & Wyoming’s St. Lawrence & Atlantic—a line that I traveled on back in the 1990s.
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In recent months, New England Central’s Willimantic-Palmer freight, job 608, has been largely nocturnal while the railroad undertook a major rehabilitation program.
New rail, ties and crossing protection have been installed. The switches at State Line are improved. And the railroad is in the best shape it’s been in decades.
Monday morning, December 10, 2018, I heard 608 working north through Monson.
That afternoon, I heard the train on its return run. So Pop (Richard J. Solomon) and I headed out to intercept it.
We caught it at both ends of the siding at State Line, then proceeded to Stafford Springs, where I made these views using my FujiFilm XT1 fitted with 12mm Zeiss Touit lens.
High contrast low December sun proved challenging. To make the most of the light, I applied an external graduated neutral density filter tapered and positioned to hold the sky exposure.
Compare the camera produced JPG file with adjusted RAW images. (There is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. The JPG reflects a ‘pre-profiled’ camera setting based on Fuji’s Velvia color setting. The RAW’s were adjusted by me to reflect conditions at Stafford Springs.)
In post processing, I worked with camera RAW files by lightened shadows, darkened highlights, and reduced overall contrast while warming color temperature and slightly boosting saturation.
As we departed Stafford, I noticed a better angle to catch the train. Stay tuned!
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Well I can tick off this state. December 16, 2018, I made my first ever photo on the ground in Alabama, when I got off the Crescent during its station stop.
Using the rear display extended, I held my FujiFilm XT1 low to the platform for this dynamic angle of Amtrak P42 126 that was leading train 19 southward toward New Orleans.
Ten minutes later I was in the diner and on the roll southward again.
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It’s the ‘blue hour’ at New Haven, Connecticut.
Amtrak’s Vermonter is one of a few trains that still changes engines at New Haven, as result of it running through from non-electrified territory to the north.
In the case of Amtrak 55, the common GE-built P42 diesel (number 192) was exchanged for a Siemens-built ACS-64 high-voltage electric.
Amtrak added a coach to the front of the train too. A wise move considering how crowded this train is.
Working with my FujiFilm XT1, I set the camera to ISO 1600 and the white balance to ‘auto’, and made some photos from the platform during our 24-minute pause at New Haven Union Station.
Many years ago, my late friend Bob Buck recalled to me a story of a child gazing out the window at the steam, smoke and wires, “Pa, is this hell?” “No son, this is New Haven!”
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On the evening of December 4, 2018, I panned CTrail train 4461 led by engine 6695 at the new Berlin, Connecticut station.
Berlin is brightly lit and makes for a good vantage point to watch and photograph passenger trains on the Hartford Line.
To make this pan photo, I set the shutter speed at 1/30thof second, fixed a point in my view finder and moved my camera and body in parallel with the train in a smooth unbroken motion as it arrived at the station.
Panning is a great means to show a train in motion.
I exposed these views using my FujiFilm XT1 with 12mm Zeiss Touit lens.
Key to my success was the high ISO setting (ISO 5000) and auto white balance setting that adjusted and balanced myriad artificial light sources.
Lacking a tripod, I positioned and steadied the camera on the half open ‘dutch door’ of private passenger car Silver Splendor as it was paused across from the Metrolink train storage sidings in Riverside, California.
My exposures were about 1/2 second at f2.8 (ISO 5000).
To make the most of the photos, I imported the camera RAW files into Lightroom and adjusted highlights and shadows to make for more pleasing final images.
Over the last few days, I’ve intercepted Belmond’s Grand Hibernianin my neighborhood three times. All hauled by Irish Rail class 071 number 077.
In each instance the lighting was less than calendar perfect.
In each instance I made digital images to best suit the scene.
Hints of autumn foliage dot the Dublin landscape, and soon Belmond’s train will conclude its touring season.
