The Christmas Present
33203 climbs away from Salisbury on Christmas Eve 1986 with the 0650 Waterloo to Exeter St Davids service.
In October 1986 I had bought my first SLR camera and two months later, putting it politely, I was still very much getting to grips with it.
On Christmas Eve I was aimed to capture some images of class 33s and 50s at Salisbury, which operated virtually all passenger trains at Salisbury then.
What I hadn't bothered with was the weather forecast, which combined the saying 'red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning' and the photographer's saying of 'f4 at a fortnight'. A heavy overnight frost was about to be obliterated by a blanket of cloud rolling in from the west.
Out I trotted and this photograph was the closest I came to any sun on a train that day. Everything else was hopelessly composed, dark or speed-blurred, or sometimes all three.
However, 34 years on, it is now clear the day wasn't a complete write-off: this image has reacted well to the wonders of today's photo-processing, and a reasonable image has finally appeared, 34 years after I took the original photograph.
The Christmas Present
33203 climbs away from Salisbury on Christmas Eve 1986 with the 0650 Waterloo to Exeter St Davids service.
In October 1986 I had bought my first SLR camera and two months later, putting it politely, I was still very much getting to grips with it.
On Christmas Eve I was aimed to capture some images of class 33s and 50s at Salisbury, which operated virtually all passenger trains at Salisbury then.
What I hadn't bothered with was the weather forecast, which combined the saying 'red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning' and the photographer's saying of 'f4 at a fortnight'. A heavy overnight frost was about to be obliterated by a blanket of cloud rolling in from the west.
Out I trotted and this photograph was the closest I came to any sun on a train that day. Everything else was hopelessly composed, dark or speed-blurred, or sometimes all three.
However, 34 years on, it is now clear the day wasn't a complete write-off: this image has reacted well to the wonders of today's photo-processing, and a reasonable image has finally appeared, 34 years after I took the original photograph.