Weather Or Not To Shoot Trains

Saturday was supposed to be a low key day for me. I had planned to stay at home and take care of a few things that needed doing there and then on Sunday, spend a day with my camera and get some trains in the view finder. The weather had set up nicely for this. Saturday was going to be cold and raining while Sunday would be warmer and nothingbut blue skies. Of course, plans are meant to be broken and as soon as I sat down in front of Facebook Saturday morning, my plans changed.

One of my Facebook friends had posted in a group I admin that the Norfolk Southern Office Car Special was in Columbia preparing to head out. So, I asked my son if he wanted to head out with me and in ten minutes, we were in the car going to intercept the train. The OCS is a special train Norfolk Southern sends out for its executives. It had been in south east South Carolina at a resort for a week. I believe they had been holding some meetings and would sometimes use the train. Now the weather was not great, but the rain was holding off, so we ended up in a nice spot I had been wanting to shoot before. The problem is that most trains run on this line either at night or when the sun angle works better in the other direction. No need to worry about sun angles on this day.

So the train comes and right away, I believe I have a workable image in spite of the weather. I've said it before, railroads run in all kinds of weather. So I go home, take care of what I needed to take care of and then sit down to edit the image. I shot maybe ten in all with two lens and chose the ninth frame to use. I had wanted to show the soccer field for the University of South Carolina behind the train as well as the stop sign to the right to better illustrate the train was going through an intersection, a somewhat unusual alignment for the railroad here. The emphasis was on the old streamliner locomotives more than the passenger cars at this spot, but I think it works well. I did something I try not to do too much and posted both a color and a black and white version here. I prefer the B&W shot, but the color shot is nice, too.



Now on Sunday when I woke up, I could tell something was off. There was no sun shining through my bedroom window. I got up and peered through the curtains. Sure enough, it was cloudy. A check on weather.com confirmed my fears. The forecast had changed and now it was to be mostly cloudy in the Carolinas. I had two definite possibilities on where to go that day. I have lost most of the high resolution versions of my shots of the Pee Dee River Railway. They are a nice shortline about ninety miles away from Columbia. They run almost every day and they typically go into the sun in both directions. The other choice was to go up to Charlotte to the public overlook at the airport. I've never been terribly happy with my aviation shots, so this was the first choice to go Sunday when I thought the weather was going to be good.

I struck both of these off the list with the downturn in the weather and ended up taking a lazy Sunday drive with my beautiful wife. We had a nice lunch together and tackled a few stores for some last minute Christmas shopping. Then on a whim, I decided to drive through the little town of Kershaw, South Carolina. My hometown railroad serves an Archers-Daniel-Midlands plant there and while I was not expecting them to be running, they often leave their train there over the weekend.

As we pulled into town, I saw railroad cars slowly moving over one of the main roads in town. At first, I thought I had caught a Sunday train on the Lancaster and Chester, which would have been cool, but it was actually the ADM crew coming out of their plant to get some more cars. And that was really cool. I did a U-turn and had to go about two miles to get back to the other side of the tracks hoping that, one, there would be an L&C train there to include in the shot and, two, that I would beat the ADM crew back.



As you can see, it was yes on both counts. But there was another surprise. As I happened up on the train, the sun came out for the first time all day. It probably shined all of ten minutes that day, all at the same time that I had randomly come across this train. Then it went back behind the clouds and didn't come out again. So while the day had not gone as I first imagined, it was actually a nice day, two days, really, of train photography, even if it were only two trains!

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