Re: Thinking Outside the Box (car) my 2 cents

Steve brings up a good point. One of the major factors in doing charters on the C&TS is time!!! I remember 1992 when John Craft did his fall photo charters. As a helper he gave me the itinerary(Schedule). He had it down with a time arrive and depart each photo spot. Well that was quickly thrown out the window as everything took far longer and we got behind the schedule and had to scrap a lot of runbys. Remember it takes about 6 hours to get across the railroad with just water stops and no runbys. Add in 2 hours for crew time before and after train runninig, so now you have 8 hours used up before boots hit the ground for runbys. That leaves 4 hours for ell the photography. You do want to keep that in mind to try to save time when you can. However there are some locations you may spend more time than others if they are special, and require more time.....say whiplash curve if you are shooting the whole curve upgrade and need to back down to retrieve the photogs. Sometimes shorter trips can actually be a plus. In 1993 the track was deemed unusable for passenger trains(Charters too) at the State-Line Curve below Cresco. We were stuck with about 8 miles of track to work with. However some guys said they got some of their best shots ever since we did "Different" shots, configurations, and turned engines, and so forth. We actually split it into two runs per day, morning and afternoon, and did some interesting things. Time was not such a big factor when you are not trying to cover the whole railroad in one day. I suppose on some of these dawn to dusk things, they might have used 2 crews when it was going to be over 12 hours.
Greg