Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: strasburg

This is a photo that I took of Strasburg #90, a Baldwin Standard Decapod 2-10-0, during the summer of 1997. It was one of a series that I still regard among my best black and white photos ever taken of a steam locomotive. This is my favorite one because it shows off the details the best of the series, in my opinion, and it is a little bit more abstract than the others, even if it's still clearly a steam locomotive smokebox. I used a Nikon N6006 with a Nikkor 35-50 zoom and Kodak Tri-X 400 film. I had just learned to shoot proper black and white in the semester or two before I shot this, and this was my first real success with black and white rail photography, so that also adds to the significance of this. Hopefully sometime in the future I'll get around to posting the others.

Some days you just get lucky. The weather is perfect, the light is perfect, your camera performs flawlessly, you're in all the right places at the right times, and you have a phenomenal subject. Actually, Strasburg #90, while beautiful, isn't the most spectacular steam locomotive you could ever find. It's just a Baldwin Standard Decapod 2-10-0 from the 1920s that was designed for hauling freight on branchlines, but it's big and bulky enough to give the impression of massive, overwhelming force. On this particular day, I wasn't in Strasburg to take photographs, but to do documentary research, but I got very lucky coming out of the Pennsylvania State Railroad Museum in that #90 was there exactly when I was, and it was a blazing hot summer day. You can see the brightness of the sun in the pictures, and although the originals are fine, the scans look more bleached. It's the only shame in displaying them here, as my old Omniscan came nowhere close to doing the photos justice.

Here's another one, as it started to move!!

Railroad photographers often like photographing the valve gear, in this case Walschaerts, if I'm not mistaken (please correct me if I'm getting this wrong!!!).

This is the turbogenerator, as #90 is new enough to have an electrical system, at least for lighting, anyway.

There's the Baldwin builder plate, although in general the photo is interesting, I think.

This one isn't even on my website. :-) It's a firearms view of the drivers, which I have changed my mind about since getting such an immense response to my rail-related black and whites.