The trains run at night

At least they can be made to look like they are. Turn some headlights on, provide selective illumination and  it looks like we've captured some mainline action.

Ithaca, New York, near where I used to live, was pretty much on the end of a branchline. It ended a few miles north of town. That branch was not the typical weed strewn, rarely used, two streaks of rust for rails. It carried some heavy traffic. There was a coal fired powerplant and an underground salt mine both served by rail  at the end. This meant long heavy trains of coal coming in, and long heavy trains of salt going out. Conrail would park the trains in the yard in town. This provided some good photo ops for me and my fellow train nuts.

One cold snowy January day we had a bonus, some borrowed Union Pacific locomotives showed up on the coal train. We would rarely see anything besides Conrail blue, so we were excited at this development. After work that day a group of us headed down to the yard, tripods and flashbulbs ready. A second train had come in that afternoon and was sitting on the adjacent track, another unusual development. We got lots of shots, different angles and scenes.

Something we did that night - maybe firing off all the bulbs - triggered the interest of the IPD, who sent a car to investigate. Some of us knew the officer, who knew that we weren't any trouble. After exchanging some pleasantrys he adminished us to be careful and took off, leaving us to our fun. Surprisingly for all the times we had been in railyards taking pictures, this was one of the few where were ever approached by the law. Things were different back then.