About the Photo
The picture above is a slightly improbable combination of an Erie Lackawanna F7 A unit with Lackawanna heavyweight passenger cars, including an excursion car at the back with an observation deck.
All of this is N-scale. The locomotive is part of a Kato set, #106-401, bought at the Lackawanna Train Shop that used to be in Painted Post, NY. The track is Kato Unitrack, from a K1 set.
The passenger cars are from Arnold Rivarossi sets, which I got at Hobby Junction in Ridgebury, CT. The building is one I purchased assembled from Saunders Greenhouse, just up the road from me - the same guy as this photo gallery. Apparently it was built by Sid Eighmey of Ithaca, NY at some point.
I took the photo with a Canon Digital Rebel mounted on a Tiltall tripod, using the stock lens at 24mm and a 420EX flash pointed at the ceiling. I imported it into Lightroom and used Photoshop Elements to add back some blue that washed out of the sky.
Originally, I was planning to add a lot of landscaping. However, as I was doing some test pictures, it occurred to me that the stark construction paper and posterboard landscape is a pretty good metaphor for what Rails provides. There's enough there to get your locomotive running, but very little landscape decoration. Hence, the photo is pretty empty, with the train getting primary focus and the building and tracks supporting it.
