A coral sunset unfolds as the golden hour ends in Miami on my East Rail 2 layout.
Almost two decades ago (October of 2007) , during the early years of my original East Rail layout, Vianney Roge visited from Paris with a few members of the RMB (Rails Miniatures de la Boucle) model railroad club. They presented me with this custom-painted car done by member JPG JPG. I always loved that car.
Over the years, as I photographed the old East Rail layout, there was one image I particularly liked. The RMB car was spotted in front of the Colmar Warehouse as a coral sunset unfolded in the back. For reasons I’m not clear about, I saved the image in a relatively small format. To make things worse, the original sunset photo, taken in Cocoa Beach, went missing. I spent hours going through old files trying to find it, all to no avail.
The original Coral Skies image was taken fifteen years ago.
I always thought that if I could grab a shot of a similarly colored sunset, I could re-create the original shot on East Rail 2. How hard could that be? Apparently, fairly hard! Thousands of sunsets since, and the stars never seemed to align. One thing I learned is that when you see a sunset you want to shoot, you’d better act and act fast. You have a surprisingly short window, measured in a few short minutes, to get the photo before it’s gone. I thought I had my quarry on a business trip to Nashville a few years ago, but in the few minutes it took to find an open area to shoot, the scene vaporized. Wednesday, while driving about in the evening, what appeared to be just a regular day with very few clouds, transformed into the shot I was looking for. I hit the gas, looked for an open parking lot and…..finally….. got it!
The new photo pulls together so many happy memories: the evolution of the original East Rail, the friendships, trips to Miami, and trips to Cocoa Beach, the site of the original (and now lost forever) sunset shot.