Old Flickr Rail Photos

This one isn't even on my website. :-) It's a firearms view of the drivers, which I have changed my mind about since getting such an immense response to my rail-related black and whites.

There's the Baldwin builder plate, although in general the photo is interesting, I think.

This is the turbogenerator, as #90 is new enough to have an electrical system, at least for lighting, anyway.

Railroad photographers often like photographing the valve gear, in this case Walschaerts, if I'm not mistaken (please correct me if I'm getting this wrong!!!).

Here's another one, as it started to move!!

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.

Back when the Rohr Turboliners were mostly unrebuilt, they operated over the entire Empire Corridor (ex-New York Central Water Level Route), and I rode them a few times before they were first withdrawn, then rebuilt and reintroduced on a dedicated NYP-Albany-Rensselaer service. If you're a New York railfan, you know the story. If you're wondering how I got into the shop, it was an organized tour. These things always require a lot of permissions and paperwork, of course, and I haven't been able to get back there since.

I took this on the same day as the 6399 shot, scanned it in 1994, and uploaded it on Oct. 26, 2006, without a rescan!!! That's when I discovered the date on the 6399 shot was wrong. I've corrected it at least on the caption, although the photo remains wrong. In any case, I didn't used to like this photo so much, but looking at the other stuff on Flickr, this one holds up surprisingly well. It's not only, I think, a decent black and white scan, but a very old one. It's only a year newer than the original negative and print!!! I had an Omniscan black and white scanner then, and I haven't gotten around to rescanning this shot. It was originally color, shot with Kodacolor Gold 400, I think, but it's now, for obvious reasons, black and white, and it might be a better shot because of it. It was my first truly successful pan shot, so it's significant to me for that reason, too.

This was taken minutes after my "arriving in" shot, which has gotten so much attention. I've been praised for the puddle reflection on this shot, but I'm posting this mainly because it goes with the other one.

This was an Anglia Intercity arrival, I think, into Norwich Thorpe Street in the Fall of 2000, and one of my first close photos of English, Welsh, & Scottish Class 67 diesels. If the chassis of it looks vaguely F59PHI to you, that would be close. It is a GMLG locomotive, but its capabilities are far beyond anything GM builds for the U.S. market. 125 m.p.h. is an easy job for these locomotives, although being mostly assigned to mail, fast freight, and excursion trains they in reality rarely exceed 100.

This photo is a little bit grainy, which is a result of a high-contrast print being fed into a primitive scanner. I apologize in advance for that, but I posted it anyway because I love the composition. Maybe in the future I'll post a rescanned one, but for now this will have to do.

I took this on the same day as the other York Intercity 125 picture, but this one was in a completely modern GNER livery, and had been for some time, as you can see the rust already soaking through. Remember that these modernistic-looking trains are already, in some cases, 30 years old!!

I used to help maintain "Green Arrow" at the (British) National Railway Museum in York, and this was the first run when I was one of the people who helped prepare it, so it was a moment of pride. It was preparing for a run to Scarborough, so I rode the train out and back and took a lot of photos, including this one. I wasn't qualified to actually work the run, as the regulations in Britain are pretty strict on that. Note that it's painted in BR Brunswick Green, and carrying its BR number, 60800. It has since, from what I've heard, been repainted back to its proper LNER colours (please somebody correct me if I'm wrong on this!).

I know that many, many people already have HST/IC125 pictures on Flickr. I'm sorry. :-) This is mine. Actually, I have a few, due to be uploaded soon. I took this when I was stranded in York on my way back to Norwich from the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, having missed both of my trains. Obviously, this was the next morning, when I decided to give the National Railway Museum a second visit, and photograph some of the traffic through York Central. This service, while still lettered for BR Intercity on the lead locomotive, was a Virgin Cross Country service. GNER had repainted all their IC125s by then, and notice the Virgin livery on the Mk.III coach the Class 43 diesel is pulling.

Here's yet another shot of Amsterdam Centraal. I loved that trainshed, and I figured I had to shoot it in black and white. This is a closer view than Picture 1. In spite of the copyright date, I shot this in December 1998.

Here's another one of my black and whites of Amsterdam Centraal. I loved that trainshed, and I figured I had to shoot it in black and white. In spite of the copyright date, I shot this in December 1998.

Here's another longtime favorite, even if, like many of my other California pictures, it's a bit overexposed because of the blazing hot weather we had on that trip. This was up in the Sierra Nevada, too. I love the realism of this shot, the fact that these SD40T-2s were so typical of California in those days, and dirty from their intended and frequent service in tunnels.

I've always liked this photo, even if many serious photographers haven't. They say it's "boring," but most of them aren't railfans! From the technical point of view, the contrast is a bit low, but since it was a gloomy Plattsburgh winter day, if I were to up the contrast on this, the detail and the grit of the scene would be lost. For the railfans, though, it's a nice shot of an F40PH in the last years of F40 haulage on Train #68, the "Adirondack."