So I had a cousin from IL that was in town for Labor Day weekend. We met up at my house and proceeded to have quite a train filled weekend:
We started Saturday morning by heading up to the Georgetown Loop. He hasn’t seen C&S #9 yet, so a trip to see her was in order. It was certainly worth my while as well.
For starters, the diesel is down with a bum traction motor, and our Hawaiian Princess (Prairie #12) has become a 2-5-2, thanks to a broken axle on her third set of drivers. So…#9 was all by herself to pull the train. Wow! I had no idea that a Mogul could make that much noise! She was just out and out IMPRESSIVE while pulling up the 4% grade.
Additionally, my cuz showed me a trail that can be accessed from the cemetery in Silver Plume to get shots along the line that one wouldn’t normally envision being able to get. Rest assured that I’ll be up there in a couple weeks when the Aspens are at their peak foliage. At any rate, here’s a couple shots from our trip to the GLRR:
Sorry about the bad lighting…we were there during mid-day high sun, so the light is a bit harsh. I’ll have better ones in a couple weeks.
After that, we headed down to Cumbres Pass, where we camped for the night. In the morning we were at Chama to board the train to Antonito. We were there pretty early, so we got some shots around the yard.
The skies weren’t the greatest while on the train, so I didn’t shoot too much, and rather just stayed in the open car and enjoyed the trip. It was a lot of fun to experience the world for once while not seeing it through a tiny viewfinder.
One set of shots I did take involved an interesting set of circumstances that we encountered. After leaving Osier, we caught up to a group of range cattle that were just roaming the line. Despite the engi
Thanks for the kind words. I kind of thought along the same lines as you about the homemade diesel. In fact, at first, I kind of thought it was the ugliest thing ever built. But, it’s started growing on me, and now I think I really like it. I hope that CRRM or someone can acquire her one of these days just to save an odd part of Colorado’s rail history.
[:I][:I][:I] Thanks Brian. I really hope you can make it out here again some day. I would love to have a chance to show you around and take you out to a bunch of my favorite photographic locales! I know you would appreciate them as much as I do!
Can’t you just open up the dark areas with PhotoShop? You’d blow out some of the sky details, but that’s what you’d get anyway if you exposed for the locomotives. My Nikon D1X shoots slightly underexposed, but all of the details are preserved so I’m OK with it. Better than losing details by overexposing.
Or you could mask out the sky and then adjust the locomotives, but that takes time.
I’m a little curious, did you have a shot in particular that you were referring to, or all of them in general? I thought I had a pretty good range of tonal values. Some of the shots might be a touch on the dark side, but it was as you said to prevent blowing out the sky.
I could probably pull back out some detail on some of the shots, but many were taken at ISO 400, which on my ancient D60 is already getting kind of noisy. Pulling too hard on the shadow details would lead to unacceptable (at least to me) noise in the shadow areas.
Anyways, thanks for the comments, and I’ll see what I can do next time.
Cool pictures, I espicially like the ones of the freight train and the San Luis Valley with the mountains in the background, it reminds me of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.
Looking at the freight train, it appears that it must not be potato season. Were there any reefers sitting around? Back in summer 2003 I saw several dozen SLC reefers out here. I have never seen them before and never since.
Thanks guys for the kind words. Eric, there was not a single reefer to be seen on the line anywhere. Oddly enough, there were lumber cars parked on practically every available siding, though. Are we in a bit of a downswing for the lumber industry currently?
That would seem to be the case, with new housing starts down because of higher interest rates and no hurricanes messing up the existing housing lately…
I was looking at satellite, or perhaps aerial, photographs of the area. It looks like SLC had reefers crammed everywhere they coud shove them. I did not see anything about the SLC on your report, I guess you did not make it out there. Keep an eye out for those SLC reefers. They seem to stay away from cameras, I have not found any photographs of them anywhere on the internet. If it were not for a bunch coming out here back in 2003, I woud not know about their existance.
Very nice pictures, CopCarSS. I particularly like the shot of Clear Creek and the boulders at the Georgetown Loop Railroad. I had recently been to Colorado in July for a visit with my cousins, and one of my cousins who lives in Denver had taken me down to Canon City to ride the Royal Gorge Railroad. I would share some of my pictures with you and the other forum members if I could only figure out how to post them in a forum.
