Western Railroad Discussion > C&NW boxcar on RailCam question

Looks like an old C&NW boxcar on the lead here..maybe a 40/50 footer........how old might this car be?

1960's?

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Looks like a ACF car built some time during the mid 70s. Pretty hard to tell. These are pretty common cars and are used for things from wood products to cotton seed used for dairy cow feed.
Bluesman

Yep, many of them are still around. Here's on at Commerce a few days go.

Sal Garcia
Pico Rivera, California

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By the way, I took that picture with a borrowed 3.2 megapixel Fuji FinePix 3800, which has a very good 6X optical zoom. Here a zoomed out shot of the same picture.
Unfortunately, like most point-and-shoot digitalc, it suffers from shutter lag that makes action shots cumbersome.

Sal Garcia
Pico Rivera, California

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Sal:

It's not so much shutter lag, as it is processing time required to get the image from the ccd to memory card, which of course increases as the pixel count goes up.

The newer cameras are usually faster on a pixel per pixel basis, and burst modes are becoming fairly common. I have 4 Sony cybershots of various models. The newest is a p72 with a 3.2 pixel count, it ready for another shot in about half the time my nearly 2 year old F505 is, on the same resolution (2240 x 1680). Plus the p72 has a 2 shot burst mode, which the F505 doesn't. While the burst mode is nice, the small print is, that it takes twice as much time to process the 2 shots and be ready for the next shot, than just taking one shot.

Nonetheless, I agree, it's a pain to have to wait for the camera. Usually I figure I have 2 chances at a particular locomotive on a moving train. Screw up the shot and your out of luck.

Happy hunting.

No, shutter lag is a distinctly different issue than writing the image to the memory card. The latter is something that happens after image capture and is less of an annoyance since it only affects situations where you need to shoot multiple shots quickly. Shutter lag is the delay between pressing the shutter release and camera actually snapping the picture and in an action situation can mean missing the intended shot unless one compensates by hitting the button early.