Flagg Coal Co. #75

Last month when I was at the Florida Railroad Museum with my group, we got to ride on 2 trains. We also were treated to a "drive by" where the 2 trains cross each other on the tracks.

This is the first steam train we road on. You can see the open car. That's used so we can sight see while riding.

The Florida Railroad Museum is quite unique in that the museum is not contained in a building. The museum IS the trains. They are all running and part of the fun is being able to ride the trains.

Normally, the trains go up and down a 6 mile track; but when they use the steam trains, they cut the trip to 2 1/2 miles due to the expense. However, they use 2 different steam trains and they let us off along the way to take photographs of the trains. At the end of the tour, we can look in the engine compartment and the engineers and conductor are all around to answer questions and to show anything we're curious about.

This particular event was part of the museum's "A Month of Steam" promotion. The tour was strictly for photographers and we were allowed all the time we wanted to take all the photos we wanted. For $16.95, it wasn't a bad deal.

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.