Toward the end of an April 1995 trip along the Mississippi with Tom and Mike Danneman, we set up along the old Burlington near the famous Mississippi Palisades State Park in Savanna, Illinois.

The streamlined Twin Cities Zephyr was all but a memory.

However at that time Canadian National was exercising rights over Burlington Northern and routing 4-5 freights a day via this Mississippi River east-bank route to reach Chicago.

The light was fading when a nearly new CN DASH-9 approached us leading an eastward freight.

I exposed this Kodachrome 25 slide using my Nikon F3T fitted with a Nikkor f4 200mm lens. This photo has appeared in print several times over the years.

For presentation here and extract the maximum amount of information from the slide, I made a multi-pass scan using a Nikon Super Coolscan5000 digital scanner driven with VueScan software.

I selected ‘fine mode’ and made three samples to refine the scan and then imported the 119.8MB file into Lightroom for refinement, color correction, scaling and final presentation.

Tracking the Light Posts Every Day!