Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: steam locomotive

This is one of my favorite rail photographs of all time. I love the way the light outlines the boiler, as well as the crisp detail of the illuminated areas, and the contrast is also near-perfect, even if the ground detail is somewhat limited. On many of my prints of this shot, I've burned the ground in, of course, and it looks like I did the same with this one.

This shot, of former Milwaukee Road #261, was actually a photo runby, with two encores! There's nothing quite like a 4-8-4 being gunned. :-) The excursion was the finale for the 1995 NRHS National Convention.

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.

This is part of the same series as Strasburg #90, Picture 3 (go figure :-)). This one, though, may have the most well-rounded artistic merit of the series, as it has abstraction, the best contrast, the best detail, and so on.

This was during the runaround, and originally I scanned this in black and white, partly because I only had my Omniscan then, but also because I thought it looked better. It's in color now, though, and I don't regret the change.

This was our train pulling into the station at Orbisonia. The trams in the background are part of the Rockhill Trolley Museum. The odd thing is that, technically, Orbisonia Station is actually located in Rockhill Furnace, while the Rockhill Trolley Museum is technically located in Orbisonia, so the names sort of don't make any sense.

I used to help maintain "Green Arrow" at the (British) National Railway Museum in York, and this was the first run when I was one of the people who helped prepare it, so it was a moment of pride. It was preparing for a run to Scarborough, so I rode the train out and back and took a lot of photos, including this one. I wasn't qualified to actually work the run, as the regulations in Britain are pretty strict on that. Note that it's painted in BR Brunswick Green, and carrying its BR number, 60800. It has since, from what I've heard, been repainted back to its proper LNER colours (please somebody correct me if I'm wrong on this!).

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.

A day ago, I had absolutely no plans on posting this...ever. At least, I had no plans to post the original 1994 scan from my Omniscan, but the events of the past hour, with one of my Omniscans getting 18 views, has changed my mind. I've always liked this shot, and I've long had the intention of rescanning it, maybe in color, maybe not, but not like this!!! Maybe sometime when I have it handy. In the meantime, this is faster. :-)