Railroad Forums
Moderators: nomis, keeper1616
RailBus63 wrote:You need to learn how to use your camera without flash - it is dangerous to fire a flash in the face of an engineer or operator and potentially harm their vision while they are operating such a large vehicle.What's the danger? Might they swerve and hit you? If a bright flash is dangerous, then why do trains run through a lightningstorm?
RussNelson wrote:What's the danger? Might they swerve and hit you? If a bright flash is dangerous, then why do trains run through a lightningstorm?Haven't you ever had someone take a picture of you with a flash camera? It's not uncommon to see spots afterwards - hardly the ideal situation for a railroad engineer who must look far down the track and respond to signal indications long before the train actually reaches the signal itself.
I suggest that the danger of taking flash photos is more one of annoying the engineer and creating an anti-railran.
RussNelson wrote:That doesn't explain why railroads operate through a lightning storm ... or down trackage parallel to a road, where car headlights might ruin an engineer's night vision for a period of time.O. Winston Link had the cooperation of the railroads for his photos and the crews were well aware of the location. Car headlight issues for the most part are easily avoidable by not looking directly into them, and lightning flashes tend not to be that much of a concern unless very close. I've operated the speeder at night runs and in that respect it is not much different than driving an automobile.
The problem is exactly as I stated earlier: be polite to engineers, because they can either smile and wave, or scowl and give you the finger. There's no safety issue at all. If you're close enough for your flash to be a problem, you're probably trespassing (light diminishes as the inverse square of the distance). If flashes were a safety issue, O. WInston Link would have been taken out and shot. His philosophy was "Never use one flash when ten would do."