Early Morning Lake Shore Limited

I’m standing on the bridge carrying Pennsylvania Route 5 over the CSX Erie West Subdivision tracks west of Lake City, Pennsylvania, on April 27, 2008

Amtrak’s eastbound Lake Shore Limited is making good time as it heads toward its next station stop of Erie, Pennsylvania.

It is early morning and the rising sun is creating strong back lighting that mutes the colors, but provides a nice glint on the side of the passenger cars.

It is the type of image that when I made it I didn’t like how it turned out. Years later I decided to scan the slide to see what I could do with it.

Upon further review I decided that I liked the glint because it nicely draw out the profiles of the different generations of passenger cars on Train 48.

There are two Heritage fleet members, a baggage car and dining car, three Viewliner sleepers and a string of Amfleet coaches and a food service car.

The differences in how those cars were designed and constructed show up well here even if the image is not all that colorful. It almost appears to be a hybrid with elements of black and white and color photography.

Good Morning Indiana

Amtrak’s westbound Cardinal is on the money as it approaches Linden, Indiana, on June 30, 2022. No. 51 is operating as P051 on the CSX Monon Subdivision. The sun has been up for less than an hour and creates a warm glow on the side of the train. The engineer of P42DC No. 17 is giving me a little wave as his train rushed past.

Night Train in Cleveland

Dawn will be breaking soon in Cleveland as the eastbound Lake Shore Limited makes its station stop not far from the Lake Erie shore. Four Amtrak trains daily serve Cleveland and all of them are scheduled to arrive between 1:30 a.m. and 6 a.m., meaning that boarding and disembarking passengers see only darkness here until their train is delayed. The scheduling is a product of Cleveland being located on the midway point of the routes of the Capitol Limited and Lake Shore Limited.

A Surprise the Next Morning

I had booked a room aboard Amtrak train No. 5 to Denver on the second leg of an ambitious journey by Amtrak that would see me traveling nearly coast to coast by rail.

I left Chicago Union Station in late afternoon on Oct. 24, 1981, aboard what was then the San Francisco Zephyr. It was not my first trip aboard Amtrak’s new Superliner equipment, but would be my first time traveling in a Superliner sleeper.

Most of the initial trip out of Chicago occurred during darkness and I don’t remember seeing much, if anything in Iowa. My dominant memory of this trip is how comfortable and cozy I felt inside my room aboard the train.

Somewhere in Nebraska the next morning I was surprised to look out my window and see that the ground was covered with snow.

I grabbed my camera, went to a vestibule door, opened the window and made this image.

If you did that today Amtrak personnel would let you know that it is not allowed. Maybe they felt that way then, too, but I just opened the window long to get the image and go back to my room.

The original slide of this image has badly faded, but the wizardry of digital scanning combined with Photoshop enabled me to bring it back to life.

My recollection is that the original slide was overexposed, so this is as good as it could be.

There is something about this image that makes it one of favorites from this era. The red, white and silver of the two F40PH locomotives leading the train add a touch of color to an otherwise barren and white landscape.

I also like how the tracks snake through the snow, lending a sense of going somewhere.

It was the Burlington Northern back then and under BNSF ownership today these tracks probably are still busy.

By the time we reached Denver, the snow was gone and I would not see any more of it during my trip. It must have been a fairly localized storm.

When the ‘Late Shore’ Wasn’t Late Enough

Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited has been jokingly called the “Late Shore Limited” by many wags. It is not an entirely undeserved reputation given how the train often runs late.

But this is a story about a day when it wasn’t running late enough.

Peter Bowler and I were making plans to go to Painesville to catch the ferry move of the Nickel Plate Road 765.

We didn’t know when it would pass through so we wanted to get there early. We may as well get there in time to catch the eastbound Lake Shore Limited.

Our objective was to get No. 48 passing the former New York Central station, which sits on the south side of the tracks. A local group is restoring the depot, yet it still has a derelict appearance about it.

No. 48 was about 18 minutes late. Fine. That would allow more time for the sun to climb over the trees and illuminate the tracks and depot.

The light kept getting better, but shadows covered the station and the tracks.

I heard the engineer of No. 48 call a clear signal over the radio. An approaching train had that distinctive pattern of headlights and ditch lights of an Amtrak P42 locomotive.

If Amtrak had just been a little later.

The track speed for passenger trains here is 79 mph and No. 48 was doing every bit of that.

There were small pockets of sunlight on Track No. 2 and I managed to get the nose of P42 No. 193 in one of those.

The trailing P42 was No. 822, which wears the Phase III livery. How I wish the order of the locomotives had been reversed. How I wish the sun had been higher in the sky.

Every photographer has had those feelings of when conditions don’t work out the way you had hoped.

There is nothing wrong with making images of objects, moving or static, in shadows. It is just not ideal from a lighting standpoint and so much of photography is about light.

Nonetheless, the inconsistent lighting pattern in the first two images produced some intriguing images.

The sunlight filtering through the trees made the locomotive nose stand out in the top photo and highlighted the trailing unit and Viewliner baggage car in the second photo.

Note how the vegetation and a structure along the right third of the image are illuminated well in contrast with the left third that is in shadows. The front of the train has just enough direct light to create a spotlight effect.

Perhaps images such as these can be planned, but I suspect more often than not they just happen.

The third image is the one that I wished had the full effect of the rising sunlight. But that had yet to occur when the train passed by.

There were still pockets of shadows on the rails 21 minutes later when a CSX freight followed Amtrak eastward on this same track.

Such is life for photographers in Northeast Ohio. We have a lot of trees and they block the rising and setting sun.

The final image in the sequence is the going away shot and it has some of the same effect that I achieved in the first two images, although it is not quite as pronounced.

Look at the track just ahead of the nose of the lead locomotive. The tracks curve here and the the sunlight is already shining on the rails.

There is a streak of sunlight along the lower sections of the Viewliner sleepers and the first three Amfleet cars. The effect is less visible on the side of the heritage diner. It is not quite the classic glint effect, but it is close.

We often think of results in terms of success or failure. Yet many endeavors have elements of both.

This image failed in the sense that the scene with the train passing the depot was not lighted as well as I desired.

Yet I succeeded in photographing the train in this location with enough light to create a recognizable image. Could it have been better? Of course, yet I can’t make the sun rise faster or the train run later. I had to photograph the train when it was here.

I got the train I wanted where I wanted it even if not when I wanted it. Some of these images have interesting lighting that produced images that I’ve enjoyed viewing.

Overall, I would call that a success, some of it in unexpected ways.