In September of 2008, Tom Klimoski sent me a photo of the eastbound Downtown Spur Yard job parked just shy of the 12th Avenue grade crossing as the crew took a lunch break. It was a pretty unspectacular shot, something he grabbed on the fly for general documentation. It stuck with me, though. I loved the way it captured a typical day and the flavor of the spur. Using that shot as inspiration, I tried to recreate the scene on my layout.
11:30 am, September 29, 2008. The crew has split the train so as not to hold up traffic, turned off the locomotive lights, and “gone to beans”. Cuba Tropical Produce is on the right. That’s Tom’s truck on the left. Tom Klimoski photo.
Recreating the photo on the layout was a little tricky. It was hard to get the camera in position and challenging to light. Fortunately, all of my structures are removable, so plucking a few off the layout opened things up a little. Removing the structures presented another problem, though. It left a very obvious blank styrene wall on the left side. A few blocks up the line was an interesting mural painted on the back of a structure that I photographed on a whim back in the day. I edited the mural shot, printed it out on typing paper, and used it to cover the blank styrene.
The model photo is comprised of four shots taken with an iPhone 6 and combined with Helicon Focus. It took two photo floods to fully light the scene. The sky image is a Google Streetview screenshot taken from I-95 near Melbourne, FL.