Archive for July, 2008

Last weekend was the annual Hot Rail railfanning event on BNSF’s Scenic and Columbia River subs.  The event is given the name ‘Hot Rail’ because…well…its hot out there this time of year.  Fortunately the day time highs in Wenatchee were only around 90 so it was much more comfortable than in previous years.  Still standing on an exposed slope, in the sun, with low humidity can make you warm.  Add in a brisk .6 mile hike (each way) and you actually break a sweat.

In all my visits to Trinidad I’ve never ventured out around the crater.  This trip I had the opportunity to and captured the image below of the Z-CHCSSE.  What a great place!  In fact most of this trip was spent capturing images from places I’d seen but have never visited so stay tuned for more!

P.S.  This image was edited with Lightroom 2.0!  I won’t go into the details about the enhancements in this product since you can read those all over the Internet.  Instead I will say that Adobe made an already good product better.   There’s a good chance that nearly ALL of my photo editing needs will be taken care of with it.  Photoshop certainly still has a purpose and will get used but I will rely on it even less. 

On January 20, 2008 a Z-CHCSSE9 blows through the little mountain town of Index, WA while railfan Todd Gleb makes a photograph of the winter scene.   

A Union Pacific manifest finds fresh air at the south portal of tunnel 3.  The many tunnels on the Cascade Subdivision make the climb from Oakridge through tunnel 3 quite the challenge.

Back in March while the UP was still detouring around the Frazier slide I spent a couple of days chasing around the Oregon Trunk.  During one trip I finally photographed something I’ve wanted to photograph since I started carrying a DSLR.  That something is a panorama including a train.  Of course this requires the train to be stopped so just the right circumstances had to be present to make this work.  In March everything lined up….

1. A northbound UP detour took the siding at Oakbrook, OR.  The DS did not give them permission to leave the SSS Oakbrook in reverse.   Because of this the conductor had to walk up from the rear so the engineer pulled just far enough into the siding to clear and then stopped.  This meant the train was not around another corner at the NSS Oakbrook allowing more of the train to be viewed.
2. The sun was out and generally pointed in the right direction.
3. I could see nearly the entire train ( no trees or other obstructions).
4. I had the thought to remember to take the panorama instead of just shooting one shot (ahh, at age 41 this can become an issue).

This image is a 31 photo panorama (3 horizontal passes) that measures 13,481 X 4021 pixels (45″ X 13″).  On disk it is 1.6GB (TIFF files including layers).  The original images were all processed together using Lightroom’s sync features and then exported as separate TIFFs.  I used Photoshop’s photomerge to combine them to form the large image.  Rendering takes about 20 minutes.   The best statistic of all is I had a blast putting it together!

The Q-RVPW1-06 stops just inside the SSS Oakbrook.  This train is detouring over the Oregon Trunk because of the massive slide at Frazier in the Oregon Cascades. 

Thanks to the West Vancouver Freight Access project this scene won’t be repeated after next year. 

BNSF 2121 returns from the cannery hole after delivering cement hoppers to LaFarge