Tom’s Montana Protest, Week 5: Another one at Milepost 189

A BNSF eastbound manifest rolls east along the Missouri River near Lombard, Montana. (click to view larger)

I'll be sharing one photo of my trip every week until I head out to Montana once again. I guess I look at it like my way of holding a protest, or going on strike, until I get my way and I depart for Big Sky Country. Along the way, I will try to give everyone some information, and other tidbits about each photograph. So come along, and join me in my protest!

After photographing Montana Rail Link's Helena Local, we were able to catch our breath and get something to drink. It was pretty warm (upper 80s) at the time, but I didn't mind. I'd much rather have it warm than cold. The sky was mostly clear too, so we enjoyed absorbing the Big Sky sun. You see, back home in Wisconsin, sun and warmth can be at a real premium (especially during the upcoming winter months). We also had a little time to formulate our next plan of attack. We decided to stay put since we knew we had another westbound coming at us. This one was a BNSF manifest freight, and it would be a much longer train unlike the short local we just got done photographing. That means the train would wrap all the way around the far curve. We were also in a good spot for early afternoon light. That's the beauty of photographing in the Lombard area. The tracks do enough twisting and turning, that you can find an angle that has good light no matter the time of day. In fact, the train you see here is headed generally southeast even though it's a westbound train.

Soon, we heard the unmistakable drone of the manifest as it closed in on Lombard Siding. We were less than a mile away from the siding as the crow flies, but the train still had more than 3 miles of Lombard Canyon to traverse. It's nice to have that kind of warning. If you're like me, you like to triple and quadruple-check every one of your camera's settings. Finally, after firing off way too many "test" frames, the train appeared and we blasted away. It may be a minor aspect of the photo, but I like the way the fisherman and his boat are seemingly "posed" for us on the Missouri River in front of the lead locomotive. He was indeed in the photo of the MRL local in the last blog, but he was in a less conspicuous spot. I hope his luck fishing this day was as good as ours was photographing trains.

We knew of one more westbound that would be showing up later that afternoon, so we'll be setting up for that next. The train was a nice change of pace, so stay tuned.

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