{"id":42673,"date":"2025-09-07T06:54:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T10:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/?p=42673"},"modified":"2025-09-06T21:00:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T01:00:05","slug":"moonlight-cola-signals-and-a-coal-train","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/moonlight-cola-signals-and-a-coal-train\/","title":{"rendered":"Moonlight, COLA Signals, and a Coal Train"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Friday night Kris suggested we go out exploring to find more freights on the move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So with my 3Pod tripod and N7-II at the ready, we drove to the Susquehanna River at Columbia, Pa. On the way we heard the Enola-Lancaster turn key up Norfolk Southern’s River Line desk dispatcher. This train was looking for permission to return west to Enola, but needed to hold east of Columbia for a 596 unit coal train to clear the interlocking at Cola.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We had a few minutes to look for suitable locations, and at the last minute I settled on the westward home-signals at COLA on the Port Road (located off River Road in Columbia, Pa.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The moon was nearly full.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I quickly set up my tripod and made this sequence of images as the loaded 596 coal train glided eastbound. In the lead was NS GE 4870, and similar to the train we saw last week, this had a two unit mid-train DPU and well over 200 cars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All files exposed in NEF RAW format and converted to DNG format using PureRaw for import into Lightroom for cosmetic adjustment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As soon as 596 had cleared COLA we repositioned to catch NS H19 coming off the branch from Lancaster. All of this was very exciting! Stay tuned for more photos . . . <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tracking the Light Posts Daily!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We had a few minutes to look for suitable locations, and at the last minute I settled on the westward home-signals at COLA on the Port Road<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[6060,10,6108,48],"tags":[8411,7979,4547,5383,7980],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BVuC-b6h","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42673"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42673"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42680,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42673\/revisions\/42680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}