Twelfth Night, also known as Epiphany Eve, is a Christian festival on the last night of the Twelve Days of Christmas, marking the coming of the Epiphany. Different traditions mark the date of Twelfth Night as either January 5 or 6, depending on whether you start counting on Christmas or December 26.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Trains are wonderful…. To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers, in fact, to see life.—Agatha Christie
The Colorado Railroad Museum is a non-profit railroad museum that’s located on 15 acres at a point where Clear Creek flows between North and South Table Mountains in Golden, Colorado. The museum was established in 1959 to preserve a record of Colorado’s flamboyant railroad era, particularly the state’s pioneering narrow-gauge mountain railroads. It’s also one of my favorite places to make photographs.
The museum has a large collection of three-foot (914 mm) narrow-gauge rolling stock and provides narrow-gauge train rides on special event days. The museum also has a coal-burning 2-8-0 “Consolidation” type steam locomotive that was built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1890 with builders number 11207. It is the only surviving four-foot standard gauge steam locomotive from the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad. All of the railroad equipment is displayed outdoors in a beautifully natural environment.
One of my favorite locomotives in their collection is the diminutive, by locomotive standards, Galloping Goose that was built from from full-sized automobiles and the museum has two of them. Galloping Goose is the popular name given to a series of seven railcars (officially designated as “motors” by the railroad) that were built in the 1930s by the Rio Grande Southern Railroad and operated until their end of service in the early 1950s.
How I Made this photograph: I made this photograph on a snowy day at the Colorado Railroad Museum.The camera used was a Contax 167MT with 28-80mm f/3.9-4.9 Yashica MC lens in C/Y mount. The image was shot on Kodak Tri-X film, exposure and focal length used was unrecorded but if I had to guess it was at 28mm. A couple of years ago, I purchased a a Contax 167MT from Japan, this time with a P5 battery grip. You can watch my YouTube video about buying camera from Japan to see what the process was like. I sold the original one in a flurry of discarding film cameras when DSLRs came along,. Dumb idea; I know that now. Back in the day I paid $39 for this lens that I purchased from KEH. I just saw a similar lens with a useless —it’s all scratched—UV filter for $19.87 plus twenty bucks shipping. It’s tempting; I’ll let you know if I get it.
The negative was scanned by Kodaks Photo CD process and opened using Lemke Software’s GraphicConverter that produced fairly good quality files from a Photo CD disc but the software is not without its quirks for those people using older computers and OS. The image file was slightly tweaked in Photoshop before adding two layers of platinum toning from PhotoKit.
The Colorado Railroad Museum is open Tuesday-Sunday 9:00 AM.to 5:00 PM rain or shine or snow and is closed on Mondays. It’s also closed for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Years Eve and New Years Day.
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