I had that sinking feeling—like I just crashed into the county sheriff—Knowing I’d done a bad thing and that it was irreversible.

Or was it?

Here’s my lesson for you:

Saturday August 20, 2016, had been an exceptional day. Tim Doherty and I had followed the Pan Am Railway office car train with simonized F-units and a former Wabash dome along the old Boston & Maine.

From East Deerfield west we’d enjoyed a clear blue dome and made dozens of great shots.

Afterwards we stopped for lunch, and got news of a westward empty coal train.

There I was at Buskirk, New York. I knew the coal empties were getting close. I was reviewing the digital photos on the back of my Fuji XT1, watching for a headlight, and trying to dial the phone, when all of a sudden I noticed the back of the camera read, ‘no image’.

It was like a door slammed.

Off in the distance a coyote howled and the sky went dim.

“What have I done!”

Rather than completely panic I did two smart things:

• I immediately shut the camera off.
• I took the card out of the camera.

I always carry a spare card in my wallet; so I replaced my now unhappily blank card (formerly holding the day’s take) with my spare.

In this way I could carry on making photos without risking further loss. (That empty coal train was just minutes away).

Tim offered me some advice on retrieving my lost photos.

When I got home before I did anything else, I backed up what I could to hard drive on the computer; then I began the slow process of trying to rescue my lost files.

Luckily I’d been using a SanDisk ExtremePRO card. This had come with a link to SanDisk’s RescuePRO Deluxe software. I followed the instructions and over the next 9 hours my laptop was gradually able to retrieve the erased files.

Saturday’s photos were renumbered and mixed in with images from last April of trams in Bordeaux, France, but in the end all of my Pan Am OCS photos were safely recovered.

So more than 28 hours after my near-fatal mistake, I was finally able to view my photos of the Pan Am OCS in brilliant living color. Happy days!

Here’s the link: PHOTOS OF PAN AM RAILWAY’S OFFICE CARS; RESURRECTED FROM BEYOND.

Tracking the Light posts daily!