Florida Railroad Museum

Today my group had another meetup. Fifteen of us went to the Florida Railroad Museum. It's unusual in the sense that the trains are the museum. There is no building as you'd expect.

For $16.95 you get to ride these old trains. Today was a special ride for photographers. We road the track, then were dropped off so we could photograph the trains in a drive by, then we were picked up again and brought back.

This is the one time we got to play on the tracks and not get in trouble. We were allowed to photograph the engine, and the worker adding coal to the fire to power the steam engine. It was difficult to take the photo because the worker only had about 3 feet of space and he had to squat on the floor to open the furnace then shovel in the coal. He watches a temperature or pressure gauge above the furnace to know when to add the coal. It's about every 2 minutes or so. We had to hang our cameras over his shoulder, but above so as to not interfere with him from the car behind him and shoot blindly. Everything in the little room is black, so we needed to use flash. I put the widest angle lens on my camera held it over him and just kept shooting as fast as the camera would let me all the while hoping for the best. That was only 5 shots before he was done putting the coal on the fire. I got lucky and got a couple fairly decent shots.

It was a fun day and we got some great photos. The clouds, as you can see were beautiful.