Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud

I’ve been itching to try out my new Fuji camera, and today provided the perfect opportunity – the start of the Nene Valley Railway ‘Santa Special’ season of running days. The weather was appalling when I woke up with a very heavy downpour over Grantham, but the forecast sounded reasonable – and to give the camera a work out, I didn’t want summery conditions anyway.

Rather than hike across muddy fields to my usual haunts, I decided to take the bike out for a run and stick to the many cycle paths around Ferry Meadows. However, the recent sustained rainstorms that hit the south (Peterborough is the south as far as I’m concerned) had drenched the park as well, so in a very short amount of time I was wearing large amounts of Ferry Meadows en route to the railway.

The Nene Valley Railway puts a lot of effort into its Santa Specials. The foreign coaches are used, with four Danish open seconds coupled to the luxury Orient Express Wagon Lits for first class passengers, and make an impressive rake. Presumably Santa does the Wagon Lits, whilst the riff-raff have to make do with an elf or two. To avoid run-rounds and shunting on the tight turnarounds, the train is top and tailed with class 14 D9516 on the Peterborough end, and 73050 City of Peterborough at the Wansford end. Three trains would run today (5 in the run up to Christmas) and I planned to shoot all of them, in both video and still mode to see what the results would be like.

First stop was at the river bridge in Ferry Meadows Park, as this spot allows photography of a long stretch of line. I was trying out continuous shooting here, plus changing exposure settings to account for the weather – at this point the sun was out, but dodging between passing clouds so that one minute it was bright light, then straight into dark shadow. Great stuff. This shot shows the tailing loco as it trundled past:

And from the same location, the full 10X optical zoom of the camera took a great crisp shot as the train crossed the bridge.

For the return trip with 73050 leading, I ventured down to the Golf Course level crossing for a spot of video, in order to catch the train rounding the bend. I have to say that the results were less than impressive, and didn’t match stills quality at all. The video quality was considerably inferior to the Samsung’s effort as well, shot at 640 x 320 resolution, as always:

Back on the bike for the next train; the sky had cleared and there were some fantastic low-sun conditions that would make for some great lighting. There is a lovely spot of line just made for these conditions, but it meant abandoning commonsense and going cross-country on the bike. Fortunately I’m no stranger to making daft decisions, so I headed off regardless. Now here’s a thing: if we can have four-wheel drive for off road cars – well, Tesco’s carpark at least – how about two wheel drive for bikes? I negotiated a bridleway that seemed to be six inches of pure mud, and the back wheel was sliding all over the place, as well as lurching alarmingly from side to side threatening to tip me off. It was a relief to get to get to the end, where a small footbridge connected with the fields I planned to set up in. Except that I’d forgotten all about the stiles – oh goody! Manhandling a muddy bike over two stiles in late November is about as much fun as it sounds.

Of course, after all this dirty and time consuming labour, the clouds returned to obscure the sun, the train was 15 minutes late and the video quality was diabolical. So that was well worth the effort then.

For the last run of the day, I chose Mill Lane overbridge. The sky was by now very dark, and the first rain was beginning fall. This was actually quite useful in a way – the poor light would be a good test of the camera, especially as I’d be pointing it downwards into a cutting in low light. I tweaked the exposure – having stepped up from point-and-shoot, I’m learning on the job – and set to continuous shooting again just to see what would happen. And the results are in:

Not bad at all, the moving train has a little motion blurring evident, but quite acceptable pictures overall. As it would only be half an hour before the train returned on the last run home, I decided to stay for it, and cycled down to the river bridge again. The rain had been umming and erring about starting properly for the last 20 minutes, and now decided that yes!, time for a downpour. Any normal person would have packed up and headed for home, but normality and I rarely see eye-to-eye. I poured myself a coffee, finished the Custard Creams and stayed put.

The last shots would be video; this time not using the zoom in movie mode as the results with it on are pretty dismal. Some rain fell on the lens, but didn’t cause too many issues with the film – this was the best piece of video all day, but picture quality falls far short of the Samsung - although, conversely, the soundtrack is awesome!

Overall conclusions for the day: I’m very impressed with the photographs from the test results, especially the zoom and low light. These are very pleasing quality, and a big step up from the Samsung. I’d like to try some night time shots as well. Video was a disappointment in terms of quality – the Samsung definitely outperforms the Fuji in all areas except sound. There was no wind noise today – possibly because there was no wind to speak of – and the audio of the train is clearly defined. Fortunately I plan to carry both cameras in the Grumpy Git bag – along with the even more important flask and box of biscuits – and I’m looking forward to the next outing. But first, I need to get these trousers into the washing machine …

Now where did I leave the hosepipe?