Getting lucky

From time to time I receive questions about how I go about photographing trains. Mostly the questions regard how I know when and where a train will be at a specific location. The truth is that 99% of the time I get lucky. In many ways it is kind of like fishing, you may sit at the same spot all day and never catch a thing, other days you may catch fish after fish after fish. I do not carry a scanner and rarely talk to any one else that relay information about train movements in the area.

Brandi and I were hanging around Old Fort, NC this past Saturday. We were starting to get into my car when I could see the headlights of a train approaching. We drove around trying to find a good location to photograph the train going through town. After photographing it in town we headed up old US 70, to try to find another location and we ended up standing on a bridge to photograph the train. Unfortunately we were not able to chase it any farther as there was also a bike race going on the roads in the area and I did not want to have to deal with passing mountain bikers while trying to rush and chase a train.

One "unique" thing about this train was that the lead locomotive (and all of the other locomotives) were running in a "long nose" forward which is not that common for this type of locomotive.





Thanks for viewing
-Joey

http://www.joeybowman.net