Tag Archives: SD60M

photography, Tips and Technique

Union Pacific SD60M in Motion — Sterling, Illinois, 1996.

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June 1996: It had been just over a year since Union Pacific absorbed Chicago & North Western.

I made this view of a westward UP train with SD60M 6276 in the lead.

A father with his young son on a bicycle look on in wonder.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is UP_6276_west_at_Stirling_ILL_on_old_CNW_Jun1996_KM_©BrianSolomon592554-copy.jpg

This single frame was exposed with my Nikon F3T and 35PC (perspective control) lens on Kodachrome 25. The film’s slow speed combined with side lighting and minimum aperture of just f3.5 only allowed me a shutter speed of 1/250thof a second, which wasn’t fast enough to freeze the train’s motion in this broadside view.

I feel that the slight motion blur makes the photo because it conveys the speed and mass of the train in contrast to the relative fragility of its on-lookers.

The tree branches at top right help accentuated the blurring effect.

What do you think?

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Burlington Northern 1991 at Beach, North Dakota.

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Desert Storm—Badlands Storm.

Exposed on Fujichrome 100 with my Nikkormatt FTN with a Nikkor f4 200mm lens, then popped off a second photo with my Nikon F3T loaded with Kodachrome. Scanned with an Epson V600 at 4800 dpi, scaled in Photoshop and reduced for internet presentation.
Exposed on Fujichrome 100 with my Nikkormatt FTN with a Nikkor f4 200mm lens, then popped off a second photo with my Nikon F3T loaded with Kodachrome. Scanned with an Epson V600 at 4800 dpi, scaled in Photoshop and reduced for internet presentation.

There’s no beach here. I stood on the edge of the Badlands looking east as a violent thunderstorm raged over the Missouri Valley near Mandan, North Dakota.

The sun was near the horizon as the last of its golden rays filtered across the open landscape. Lightning flashed in the distance.

This had been Yellowstone country in Northern Pacific days: massive 2-8-8-4s were built to move freight across the difficult undulating railroad east of Glendive, Montana.

No Yellowstones for me. By 1994, they were but a distant vision, all scrapped before I was born.

A headlight appears on the horizon. What’s this? A westward empty coal train returning to Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. An unusual white-faced locomotive in the lead.

This was Burlington Northern SD60M 1991, a specially painted to commemorate Operation Desert Storm.

This is among my favorite photographs from my big 1994 trip that began in January near Rochester, New York and ended six months later at Waukesha, Wisconsin.

I’ve made good use of this photo over the years. It appeared in Pacific RailNews 1994 Annual Rails West and again in my book The American Diesel Locomotive published by MBI in 2000.

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Norfolk Southern on the old Erie Railroad in August

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I thought it would be nice to take a look back at summer; warm, green and sunny!

Norfolk Southern M3T plies the old Erie Railroad near Portageville, New York on August 20, 2010. Exposed with a Canon EOS 7D with 200mm lens at ISO 200, f6.3 1/800th of a second. Auto white balance.
Norfolk Southern M3T plies the old Erie Railroad near Portageville, New York on August 20, 2010. Exposed with a Canon EOS 7D with 200mm lens at ISO 200, f6.3 1/800th of a second. Auto white balance.

I exposed this photograph near Portageville, New York on August 20, 2010. A Norfolk Southern SD60M was working an extra eastward freight symbol M3T on the former Erie Railroad.

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Tomorrow, a look back along the Erie route to 1988.

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Burlington Northern, Sentinel Butte, North Dakota, July 12, 1994.

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Revisiting the Badlands.

Empty coal train, North Dakota.

BN SD60Ms westbound at Sentinel Butte. Exposed with a Nikon F3T with f1.8 105mm lens on Kodachrome 25 slide film; shutter and f-stop information unrecorded; metered using a Sekonic Studio Deluxe hand-held light meter.

In mid-July 1994, I spent several days photographing along Burlington Northern’s former Northern Pacific mainline in western North Dakota. Here the railway snaked through the Badlands, with the landscape characterized by unusual geological formations.

On the evening of  July 12, 1994, BN sent a fleet of westward empty coal trains (described as ‘coal cars’ on the railroad) over the NP between Mandan, North Dakota and Glendive, Montana. At 7pm I caught this empty led by an SD60M at Sentinel Butte. Fast moving fair weather clouds made for some complicated lighting and a tricky exposure, but ultimately resulted in a more dramatic photograph.

This was my second experience with this line. My first was viewing the line from the dome of the North Coast Limited some 24 years earlier. I was only four years old on that trip, but the train ride gave me lasting memories. My dad exposed slides from the dome and dutch-doors of the train and from the Vista dome, but I wasn’t yet working with cameras.

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