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Trainorders.com Announces 2005 Railroad Fall Colors Image Contest Winners

Grand Prize Winner 1 $150 Prize

Michael Peters shot this interesting image that sums up Fall with the change of colors at the lower elevations and snow on the peaks. As an added bonus, this lashup is quite colorful in the spirit of the season.

The photo was taken on October 12, 2003 during the annual Alta-Mont weekend at the Durham Road crossing, about halfway between East Glacier and Browning, Montana on the BNSF's Hi Line Subdivision. Camera was an Canon EOS 10D with a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L zoom lens. ASA was set for 200 and the exposure was 1/1500 sec at f/5.6. The lens was manually focused and at the full 200mm, making an effective 320mm focal length when combined with the 10D's 1.6x angle of view. Camera and lens were on a tripod.

The raw file was converted in Adobe Photoshop CS2, where I made some overall tweaks to color and saturation. I resisted the temptation to add foliage to the already bare Aspens to the upper right of the lead locomotive. The file was sized and output to a 30x20 inch print. This final file was then resized and saved as a jpeg to post to the Trainorders site.

Grand Prize Winner 2 $150 Prize

In this striking image captured by David Davies, Western Maryland Scenic RR 734 pulls a photo freight as part of a Carl Franz Fall Special on the WMSR in October 2004.

It was a foggy, cold, rainy day (depending on the altitude) as the special climbed up the old Western Maryland from Cumberland to Frostburg, MD. WMS 734 is crossing C and P bridge #2 on a 2.8% climb to Frostburg after leaving the former WM mainline. In the couple months prior to the photo specials, one or two dozen individuals help clear photo locations, where as many as 80 individuals may shoot the photo special during the approximately 30-40 run-bys a day.

Image was captured with a Nikon D70 digital camera, Nikkor 18-35 mm AF ED lens (image taken at 26 mm). Shutter speed was 1/250 sec at f4.5, camera ASA probably 200 (Photoshop does read it in the EXIF file). Even at that speed, it is slightly underexposed, and has to be enhanced, but 1/250 was necessary to stop the cation.

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