Strasburg #90, Picture 1, Strasburg, PA, USA, 1998

Some days you just get lucky. The weather is perfect, the light is perfect, your camera performs flawlessly, you're in all the right places at the right times, and you have a phenomenal subject. Actually, Strasburg #90, while beautiful, isn't the most spectacular steam locomotive you could ever find. It's just a Baldwin Standard Decapod 2-10-0 from the 1920s that was designed for hauling freight on branchlines, but it's big and bulky enough to give the impression of massive, overwhelming force. On this particular day, I wasn't in Strasburg to take photographs, but to do documentary research, but I got very lucky coming out of the Pennsylvania State Railroad Museum in that #90 was there exactly when I was, and it was a blazing hot summer day. You can see the brightness of the sun in the pictures, and although the originals are fine, the scans look more bleached. It's the only shame in displaying them here, as my old Omniscan came nowhere close to doing the photos justice.