Well, I had planned to be a lot quicker adding a follow-up thread, but have been away from home a lot over the past few weeks.
So tonight, thread #2 covering the next section of the Southern Steam Spectacular, the afternoon run of two K class locomotives from Ballarat up to Sea Lake in the northern wheatbelt of Victoria. The morming run from Melbourne to Ballarat powered by R class locomotives was covered
here.
On arriving in Ballarat, the R class locos were taken off the train and two K Class locos attached. Unfortunately no photos of the changeover as I quickly chased down fuel, lunch and a coffee before rejoining the cavalcade of train spotters heading north out of Ballarat. The lack of changeover photos was also in part due to the loco change surprising me as to how quickly it was done. The schedule indicated a one hour stop, but the train was 30 minutes late from Melbourne. So I thought I had a hour up my sleeve to refuel both myself and the car and get back to the station with time to spare. But when I got back to the station after a 30 minute break, I hopped out of the car and was about to walk a few metres to a nearby bridge with views to the station when there was a toot of whistles and the train pulled out per its original schedule. This left me badly positioned and with no route out of Ballarat sorted out. I didn't rejoin the train for some 30km as Google Maps took me on a route northwards that I discovered wasn't following the rail line.
Once I got to the small town of Clunes, I stopped and set up, somewhat worried that I was alone and hence had missed the train already. But after a new minutes, the train followers' circus pulled up in a rush, so I knew then I was ahead of the train.
The annoying mid-level cloud had by this stage lifted and thinned quite a bit, so much nicer photos for the rest of the afternoon.
While stopped for water at Maryborough...
The K class was designed and built by Victorian Railways in several batches. The first were built in 1922-23. More were ordered just before World War II, with deliveries over about 10 years. The K class was designed to be a powerful but light branchline goods locomotive, 2-8-0 configuration, able to be run on the most lightly built Victorian broad gauge lines. They proved to be remarkably successful and versatile, and many have been preserved.
Small town (forgotten which one) further up the track. Didn't think to turn the K-1's GPS on until the next day, doh!
And one of my favorites from the whole trip away, somewhere in the eucalyptus forests south of Inglewood...
At Wycheproof (a town I'd never heard of until this trip), the two K's were separated and only one loco took the train on its past leg of the day to Sea Lake.
By this stage, the train was well behind schedule and the sun was well and truly starting to set - the sunset colours had already been and gone.
Solo K153 heading out of Wycheproof in failing light. I only had a go at editing this image tonight as I was making this thread. The original RAW file is terrible - ISO2500 with the train severely underexposed (underexposed black is NOT good!) as I tried to avoid burning out the sky. After Topaz Denoise (severe noise setting) had a go, along with the usual Camera RAW adjustments and a gradient filter, the final JPEG came out surprisingly well. Not something you would make a large print of, but reasonable for a smallish image and better than I was expecting.
I wouldn't have bothered to head out to Sea Lake (80km up the road in rather flat featureless country) other than for the reason that I had booked my night's accomodation there. So I had no choice. I sped ahead of the train given the light was pretty well gone, so had time to book into my motel, make a bit of dinner and then head back down to the track, not optimistic of getting any good photos as now it was pitch dark with the area where the train was going to stop was no more than a grain silo siding and without any lighting.
But when you start with low expecations, the only way foward is up!
Sea Lake silo art, lit by the LED lightbar on one of the train follower's car. Nicely lit up for the train passengers to view on arrival.
Once the train arrived, the same car provided some illumination for both the train crew and we assorted photographers and videographers.
Funky lightstar from the loco headlight in the image above - lens was a very new toy - the DFA * 50/1.4 @ F5.6
Another with the DFA* 50/1.4. Black and white conversion through the old free version of Nik's Silver FX.
Attempting a 3 image long exposure HDR to address the dynamic range challenges...
Locomotive promptly moved off, so no HDR image, but a somewhat funky motion image instead.
There is very little accomodation in Sea Lake so the passengers were bussed to Swan Hill some 80km away for their dinner and overnight accommodation. I heard they weren't real happy, as they got to their accomodation around 11pm, tired and hungry. I'm not surprised they were unhappy, as they would have been up at 5am or so to make the Melbourne departure.
After they were bussed off, K153 was run around to the rear of the train, coupled up, and ran tender first back to Wycheproof where the passengers were to re-board the next morning.
