Eastern Railroad Discussion > Aftermath of B&LE Derailment

After seeing the post by FEC2000 and some local news coverage of this derailment this past Wed. evening we decided to head north to see if the ore run was running. I have a new Nikon D750 which can take decent movies. So I planned on doing a video on an ore run if possible. I found an area at the KO road crossing ( north of Greenville, PA. ) where I was able to park my car. Definitely more snow up there than where I live near Washington, PA. I setup my tripod in the deep snow and made sure it was secure and level and then mounted my camera and set it up and then removed it and waited in the car. I trudged up to the signal bridge in knee deep snow to look at the lights and saw they were all red. Shoot, a northbound and I would be looking into the sun and all that white snow. My only chance was to get it going by. Around 1:15 PM I heard B&LE #905 get clearance from Sandy ( right where I was ) all the way to Conneaut. So back to the tripod to mount the camera and wait. I did not have to wait long as I could see him coming on the low line out of Greenville. I am guessing this train was put together there. So here is a video of B&LE # 905, CN #5336 and B&LE #907 taking 97 empty hoppers north. I got a short toot of the horn from the crew. Anyway cool to see it go by with the snow flying. One thing I did notice on the video was some sort of jumping of the video. I have no idea about that. I selected aperture mode and f8. The camera and tripod were sturdy and level and the zoom ring on my lens is not sloppy. I may have to dig into the manual some more. I considered myself lucky to catch this move. We then visited my wife's uncle at St. Paul's assisted leaving in Greenville.

After the visit I decided to drive down to the area of the ore train derailment. I had heard that it was pretty inaccessible but decided to check it out. Working my way south down route 8, I got unto Jamisonville road and followed that to where it met up with rose 308 ( W Sunbury road ). At the Jamisonville road crossing I saw several CN trucks and some heavy equipment along the road and the views I could get of the track showed snow. So I knew that nothing happened here. So continuing on the road makes a hard left and right there is a short extension down near the track. Several big tri-axel trucks where parked in the area. I assume the used this short stub to deliver ballast. Moving on I got onto 308 and drove over the track and looking south I could see a lot of equipment and activity. There is no walkway on this bridge and the snow built up from plowing made it impossible to walk out on the bridge. So I took a few quick pictures on a slow drive-by. As you can see it looks like two hoppers off to the left and it looks like the track was replaced starting at the curve. It was late afternoon and light was fading and this is all I got. After getting home and looking at a map of the area I see Pinehurst road is to the right of my pictures and follows the track a little before going under it. I wish I would have followed that to see if I could have seen anything worthwhile. Maybe someone else did and will share some pictures.

An easy way to find this area is to follow route 8 north from Butler and right at the Clearview Mall you turn right onto route 308 ( W Sunbury road ). Follow that to where it goes over the track.

Enjoy, John

---

---

You must be a registered subscriber to watch videos. Join Today!

Great video, really like the perspective. I see what you describe, the focus adjusting? Really great regardless

Interesting narrative, fine video to boot! Hardly any graffiti on those hoppers, a pleasant surprise.

Neat video. The symmetry of the cars is really neat and no graffiti looks good.
Brian Stevens

Thank you all.
VFPNSFAN, in thinking back it could have been the vibration of the train. I should have screwed back the rubber pads at the end of the tripod legs to expose the metal spikes. I may not have had the feet of the tripod on the ground. The snow was 3 feet deep and crusty. Lesson learned for the next time.
John

I don't think the camera issues are the result of e vibration. It looks like an autofocus problem. I'm not sure how to avoid that in the future, perhaps other videographers can enlighten?

I really enjoyed the video. I was hoping to see the train dissappear completely before the video ended....

nice vid John ... approx how many cars ... what's the max grade betwwen Conneaut and Greenville ... both directions ...

Posted from Android

P Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't think the camera issues are the result of
> e vibration. It looks like an autofocus problem.
> I'm not sure how to avoid that in the future,
> perhaps other videographers can enlighten?
>
> I really enjoyed the video. I was hoping to see
> the train dissappear completely before the video
> ended....


You have a point about the autofocus. I will do more reading on that. The wind started to pick up as you could hear it at the end. That is why I stopped it so soon but after viewing it I regretted doing so. Another lesson learned.
John

Out_Of_Service Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> nice vid John ... approx how many cars ... what's
> the max grade betwwen Conneaut and Greenville ...
> both directions ...
>
> Posted from Android


OOS, 97 cars. There are several grades each way but I do not know how much.
John

It looks like your camera was on auto focus and was trying to refocus as each car went by. I'll bet there's a manual focus setting that would keep it from doing so. Excellent video and excellent sound too.

Nice coverage John,
in the video.....
I was waiting for the train to come into view on the distant horizon,
Surprise, Surprise....

A great catch, especially with the interesting diagonal perspective. Thanks for sharing.

This video is a real challenge for any auto focus system because of the speed, diagonal motion, and varying snow clouds kicked-up. I think the auto focus was perhaps looking at the vertical car ribs and trying to refocus as they flew past. Those vertical rib lines would cross several auto focus points (it looks like in the D750 specs there are now 51 auto focus points!!!) as each vertical crossed the field of view diagonally, and alert the auto-focus to recompute. In addition to that, it'd see vertical lines, then they'd fade/converge into the distance, it'd get confused, and it would go back to try to catch the next car's vertical lines. Or maybe the snow clouds alerted the auto focus to recompute? Just speculation on my part. My Nikon D90 was one of the first to offer video in the Nikon DSLRs, and it doesn't have the logic to refocus video while underway. If I were shooting with my D90, I would've pre-focused video manually on the signal bridge as a compromise, and hope I guessed correctly. Maybe next time you can experiment with pre-focusing video manually as an override? Of course, YMMV. ;) Cheers!

...Karl

Upon further introspection, I suspect the flying snow may have had more to do with the autofocus issue than the moving train. To test this theory, you could set up for a video at the same, or similar, location absent the blowing snow and see how the camera does with the same settings.

I would be interested in the results.

I have taken a handful of videos with a fairly nice video camera, and I have autofocus issues with an oncoming train as the bright headlights throw the system off. Once the headlights are past, the autofocus does fine.