Well, for today’s walk I decided to head back up to the MP7 area in Ledyard, stretching my legs, as well as shooting Providence & Worcester train NR-2. The weather was warm, but there was a thin veil of high clouds, and a stiff breeze, so the reflection shots off of the little tidal pool I found yesterday were out of the question. But I figured there were other angles down there that I could work, plus I’d get a decent bit of hill climbing in addition to my walk. So I got to the little gravel parking area, sprayed on some bug repellant (the ticks are out down here), grabbed my gear and started walking.
As I headed down the side of the hill, I started looking for angles along the tracks – nothing struck me right away. So I walked about 20 yards north to the little tidal pool from yesterday, and still nothing struck me. Neither telephoto, wide nor fisheye angles really worked for me here. While contemplating angles, the scanner came alive with NR-2 reporting to the Worcester dispatcher that they were south and clear of MP12 in Norwich. 5 more miles until they’re on top of me, so I’d better hurry up and decide. I turned around and headed south about a quarter mile and found my answer.
Right at the MP7 mile maker, the hill is quite steep, but there’s some old ties up against the hillside that would make a decent stable perch at about roof-level as the train passes. So I got up to where I wanted to be and checked things out – yep, I think the angle will work from up here. A minute later, the train started sounding for the crossings at the old Norwich Hospital site to the north in Preston. From the looks of things, NR-2 was a decent sized train today. So a couple long telephotos of the train rolling south were in order. The first shows the lead power and some of the Tilcon cars on the headpin, and the second shows the entire train – about 25 cars – rolling past Stoddard Hill.
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Moments later, the train rolled into view doing track speed over the bridge at the tidal pool.
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Since it was a fairly long train, that gave me a chance to safely get down the embankment, switch from the telephoto to the 15mm fisheye, adjust the ISO speed down to 100, stop down to f/13 and set the shuter speed to 1/25 of a second, and get a blur shot of the trailing power speeding past the MP7 milemarker.
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After that I reversed the lenses, and grabbed this telephoto shot of the tail end of the train heading towards Allyn’s Point
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From there, it was back to the car (walking back down the tracks, then uphill to the parking area) and back to the office for the rest of the day. Of course, it’s sunny now…oh, well. Can’t win ’em all!
Thanks for looking!
Tom
