Night Moves

I nearly didn’t head out to take this shot. It was blowing a gale, plenty of rain about, and like many other things, the Vline signalling communications system had copped a dose of dodgy data issues due to the Cloudstrike outage that had a global impact. I didn't expect the network to recover, and a special train would be low on the list of priorities to work through the out of position revenue services.

While steam heading towards Bendigo after dark is unusual, 707 Operations had two weekends of consecutive Riverlander tours running to Deniliquin, so there would be other opportunities.

It was nice and warm in front of the fire, so I decided to settle in.

Surprisingly, we heard the train leave Newport on time on its way into the city, a good start, and watching the weather map, the rain kept circling around, leaving a big hole with Sunbury just on the clear edge, where I wanted to shoot.

General consensus with some friends on a couple of chats was don’t bother, one however said you have a heater in the car, and coats, why not?

So I thought what would O Winston Link or William C Gill do?

( They probably would have been out and set up in the daylight, but let’s not dwell on that)!

So at 9:30 off I went.

Yes, it was horribly windy, but not a lot of rain fortunately, and I set up in the inky darkness.

I’m so glad I did!!

Setting up in the darkness, I wasn't exactly sure how to lay things out, but had a reasonable idea of where I wanted the light. Looking at other people's photographs of similar bridges and how they lit them, and having a vision in my head of what I wanted to achieve certainly helped me.

The preceding Bendigo Vlocity as I was setting up gives a perspective of how dark it was.

I took a series of test shots, first with two flashes, then walking back to the car to get the third one to experiment with some lower fill.

It took bit of mucking around to get light evenly on, and hopefully above the bridge, without tree shadows, and too many highlights.

Nothing else to do now, but wait for the train, and hope it didn't rain on my gear.

Some of you might be thinking, is setting off a series of flashes going to distract or impact the driver of the train?

I was worried about that, but in the week prior was discussing what I was thinking of doing with some friends, one of whom happened to be rostered on this trip as fireman.

He’d had other photos taken at night where he knew it was happening, and hadn’t even noticed the flash going off. Being side on, there wasn't much of an issue.

That eased my concerns considerably

We talked about it a few days later, he was looking out for me, and didn’t see anything, and assumed I hadn’t bothered due to the weather!

R707 was leading, so I heard its whistle on the approach to Sunbury, but it was the noise of the A and N class diesels slotted in behind the R I could hear as it got closer.

I put my finger on the shutter release, and waited, and fired.

It was difficult to see the flashes going off, but the screen on the back of the camera lit up with what I'd captured, and I was pretty happy with myself!

Packing up and walking back to the car, I could hear the train climbing up towards, Clarkfield and Riddles Creek, the sound carrying on the northerly wind.

I've had two A2 size test prints made on Canson Platine Fibre Rag, a glossier paper than I normally use, to bring out the deeper blacks.

The print is up in the shop for sale, available in colour or black and white in the Iron Highways collection.

Thanks again everyone for reading My Railway Life Journal.