Here is a little food for thought. I welcome your comments and suggestions, and I am particularly interested in hearing if anybody knows of anything similar to this being done.
Photographers have long sought to capture the excitement of moving trains. Video can capture the sound and motion of an entire train as it passes. The most readily available composition is from a stationary viewpoint at trackside, which offers a variety of possible viewing angles. Riding on a train can be more exciting than watching it pass, but capturing the excitement in a video can be problematic. Pacing a train can make the viewer feel more at one with it, giving the feeling of riding on the train, but pacing requires the availability of a parallel road, the right lighting, minimal road traffic, high performing trains, and a photogenic setting. A train's locomotive cab offers the best view, of the unfolding railroad ahead and passing landscape, buildings and trackside structures. But it is hard to include the locomotive in that view, and the locomotive is a big part of the excitement.
I believe the fundamentally most appealing perception of a moving train is sound and video looking forward from on top, two to six cars behind the locomotive, and about ten feet higher than the top of the car. The ideal subject would be a heavy freight train with multiple units working hard in mountain territory. The sun would be about half high, from behind. Numerous curves would offer very explicit views of the locomotives as they wind their way up a steep grade, along a picturesque flowing river. The entire track scene would be captured as the train heads into tunnels and over high trestles as it crosses and re-crosses the river. The enormous sound of the locomotive engines would be captured along with sound of the track and wheels, and the horn. The camera would be on top of the third or fourth car, which would be a covered hopper because they are high and have top running boards. The few cars ahead of that viewpoint would be low cars such as gondolas, so as to minimize the obstruction of the view.
Trains have a lot of visually exciting movement besides their forward travel. Cars and locomotives radically bounce, rock, sway, and lurch both up and down and side to side. And the individual cars and locomotive units make these movements independent of each other. Most of the time, this movement is unapparent when viewing a train from trackside as it passes. People who have never ridden a train would me amazed at how much the cars bounce around.
While this motion is exciting to see, it also affects the stability of the view if it is transmitted through someone hand-holding the camera in a way that degrades the image product. For that reason as well as the requirement to have the viewpoint ten feet above the top of the hopper car, the camera of this video concept would not be hand held. Instead, it would be mounted on a special mechanical device that would be fastened to the running board of the hopper car. This device would be a remote controlled operating boom that can be lowered for passing under bridges and through tunnels and then raised back to full height. It would stabilize the camera to prevent visual degradation, but still capture the relative bounce and sway of the locomotive units and first few cars in the view.
The intent would be to use camera and audio equipment that could capture the best possible quality, and to just let it roll without interruption. I think that this whole setup and subject composition would produce unbelievably spectacular results that would make all the effort worthwhile. More or less the same result could be achieved by the use of a helicopter, but that approach has some drawbacks that this system avoids.
Of course, this would require the cooperation of the railroad company, and that might take some convincing. But it could be carried out without interference with the operation of the train and without a safety issue. The camera operator would need to ride the train, and the logistics of where to ride would need to be worked out. The trailing unit would be an ideal place for the camera operator to ride.
Here is an example of a video that patterns what I have in mind, but does not go as far as what I am suggesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyoJ15d1fXo
This is a train running in India with what I suspect is an Alco locomotive. In some third-world countries, they will let you ride the car tops if you want to. I think the sound contributes as much as the visual. Turn it up. The camera may be hand held, but it is stabilized quite well to the car top. But in this example, the camera is right at the rooftop, and you can see that a higher viewpoint would show the engine and closely adjacent landscape better. Getting back a few cars further would also make the view more expansive. And of course the video quality could be far better than as it appears on youtube. The lighting would be better if it were not midday with a high sun, which makes glare and wipes out color.
The first thing that popped into my mind was, "Don't Bogart that joint my friend". Captain Beefheart possibly? I only did grass during 1968-69 in Viet Nam before returning to 16oz PBR. Today it's neither but you flashed me back. Wow, man.
RIXFLIX
rixflix aka Captain Video. Blessed be Jean Shepherd and all His works!!! Hooray for 1939, the all time movie year!!! I took that ride on the Reading but my Baby caught the Katy and left me a mule to ride.
ValorStorm wrote:Good concept. One gets a sense of the train as well as the locomotive, and the relationship of both to the entire scenery. I think I just might prefer this type of video over cab rides.
Cab rides are a thrilling experience for railfans who are not in them every day. Certainly they offer a far deeper visual and tactile experience than riding as a passenger in a coach or even a dome. But the cab ride experience is a combination of things, many of which escape capture by sound/video. If the camera is stabilized to the locomotive, looking ahead, the sense of secondary motion is lost. All that remains is the motion of forward travel. Watching the scene unfold with the travel can be very interesting, but I think the real magic is in the secondary motion. Seeing the travel motion without the secondary motion is kind of like listening to a stereo with one speaker not working.
The video viewpoint that I am suggesting may not be that easy to relate to because it is, for all practical purposes, inaccessible. The closest you could get would be standing on top of the third or fourth car of a moving train. What I am proposing would be 4-8 feet higher than that, so you would need to use a stepladder to see the view that I am referring to. A high angle shot like this is sometimes called a bird's-eye-view. Since this would be moving with the train, I would call it a flying bird's-eye-view. The practical and realistic way to get the camera up there is with a mechanical boom temporarily attached to the running board of the car.
Rixflix,
Don't Bogart That Joint was recorded by Fraternity of Man and also by Little Feat.
Bucyrus,
we may be kindred spirits and I hate to dampen them, but how can you think that the railroads would ever go for this idea. It wouldn't tuirn a buck.
I guess I'll have to watch and hear "Easy Rider" again to check the credits on "Don't". Thanks for reminding me of Little Feat..."Willin'"... Tucson to Tumcari, Tehachapi to to Tonapah (my spelling may be off here, according to Terraserver)...Dallas Alice...Commander Cody...Hot/Rod/Lincoln... and earlier, Canned Heat's beautiful "Going Up the Country".
No, they might employ their advertising firms to do the camera work, but never us fans, buffs and nuts.
Santana blew us East-coasters awaaaay at Woodstock.
I will always be glad I didn't go to the Atlantic City festival the week(?) before, and actually bought a $19.00 ticket in July. I was riding my new souped Honda 350 with carburetor venturi's, clip-on low bars, TT seat and Benelli 5-gal racing tank . Brought all of the marijuana I'd smuggled out of Vietnam via hold baggage and gave it away, just to shut that door. I was popular for about five minutes but was invited to several soggy meals.
I am sorry for my earlier Bogart post and apoligize now.
Yers,
Rick
rixflix wrote: Bucyrus,we may be kindred spirits and I hate to dampen them, but how can you think that the railroads would ever go for this idea. It wouldn't tuirn a buck. No, they might employ their advertising firms to do the camera work, but never us fans, buffs and nuts.
No need to apologize for the "Don't Bogart" comment.
I realize this won't be easy, and the hardest part will be convincing the railroad companies. But I only have to convince one. And I would not approach them as a fan or buff with a crazy, half-baked idea. In fact the idea needs to be fully tested and perfected before approaching the railroads with it. Beyond that, I would not generalize about what the railroad companies will or will not do.
There are actually three parts:
1) Design, build, and test the boom.
2) Procure the camera and sound recording equipment.
3) Convince a railroad company to try it.
I have no idea what equipment to use for the video and sound. I would seek a second party for that component. My main contribution would be the design and construction of the boom. This is a big commitment because it would need to be done before approaching railroad companies. Certainly the cost of building the boom would be several thousand dollars. It would need to be operational with its own power supply. Any power or control signal failure would cause the boom to drop by gravity.
I would lift the boom with a pneumatic cylinder using compressed air from a pre-charged, portable reservoir. A battery would also be needed to power the cylinder control valve, which would spring to vent position with a loss of electric power. The boom arm would need parallelogram linkage to keep the camera level as it is raised and lowered.
I have not analyzed the economic viability of this venture as a business, but I do speculate that the product would have significant value. I can visualize the product result, and consider spectacular to be the low baseline of descriptive adjectives. As I mentioned above, the closest thing that I have seen to this approach is the use of a helicopter. Certainly helicopter video captures the fullness of the birds-eye-view. But when you get that high in the sky, the view becomes somewhat of an abstraction of the actual experience on the ground; just a pleasing graphic design. Right now I am just in the thinking stages of this concept, and I thought I would throw it out to see if anybody had anything to add.
One little point of information: How dreadful would the accident be if the boom failed to lower?
If this is a negligible liability, and all you lose is a camera, somebody could afford to try. If a person's life depends (like if the "boom" were a person, heaven forbid). Well that would be different.
How to control the boom? How about from trackside using several ground crew with radios?
John
zinger,
I would welcome smoke as part of the action, but you are correct that smoke could obscure the view if it were too dense, too close to the camera. I posted the youtube link only as reference pattern for what I have in mind. It is a good effort and an interesting video. I think the sound contributes a lot as well. But what I am proposing, I expect to far exceed the quality and effect of that example video. That is just one engine with the camera right behind it, at rooftop elevation. I would want several engines working wide open with the viewpoint a few cars back from the engines, and 10 feet above the car top. Any train in any location would be interesting to see under these conditions, but a mountainous setting offers the best visual components and the grades to make the engines work hard. Higher elevations also offer clearer air, more intense sunlight, and brighter colors. Mountain canyons can also concentrate the sound for good effect.
People admire those Alcos for their smoky personality. For reasons that I do not understand, some refer to the smoke as clag. Here is another link to a train in India being handled by the same type of engine as the car top video linked to my first post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvdt37l2SO8&feature=related
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