At the tail end of the railfan’s photographic golden hour, Y120 shoves a massive reefer down the spur of Pan Am Frozen Foods on my Downtown Spur layout. Photography is a way to experience our layouts in a way that’s impossible with the naked eye. I used my backup iPhone6 for this shot and then combined multiple images with Helicon Focus.
Here’s the prototype photo that inspired the scene, taken on a railfan trip with Tom Klimoski (the tiny dot on the right) in January 2011. The spur isn’t that long, and the industry isn’t that big, which makes the massive reefer look so out of place. Deliveries to Pan Am were very sporadic in the late 2000’s. It would be months without seeing a car and then, just when you thought the spur was abandoned, something like this would show up. That’s what made Miami so unique back then, you never knew what to expect, what was abandoned and what was still active.
The razor wire over the awning has also been so interesting to me. Keeping the frozen foods on lockdown!
Looks like you got Toms best side! :-))