On the Friday evening of this year’s Bluebell Railway Spring Gala, I attended a lovely little evening charter at Horsted Keynes, featuring visiting locomotive W8 Freshwater. Much like the similar night charter at Giants of Steam the previous autumn, this would involve static poses of a locomotive in steam. This time, I had the sense to bring a tripod with me for longer exposures, so I wouldn’t need to rely on the higher ISOs I needed on that first outing.
This would be a bit different to that charter. That time, we had two large tender locomotives at Sheffield Park with passenger coaches. This time, we had a little tank engine and some goods wagons at Hosted Keynes, making for some nice variety between the two charters.
Freshwater would spend the whole time on platforms 4 and 5 – a slightly unusual setup as the track has platforms on both sides of it. We briefly started off on Platform 5 as some of the crew posed.
As you can see, already I was breaking out a four second exposure. We soon crossed to Platform 4, where some crew activity meant I needed to pull out a shorter exposure (and therefore a higher ISO).
Given all of the light sources in the frame, I decided to close up my aperture to create some stars. With an aperture of f/20, I called on an exposure time of 30 seconds to keep the aperture somewhat under control.
Here Freshwater was releasing a lot of steam, so I went for a longer exposure to try to capture some of that atmosphere.
We crossed back to Platform 5. As we repositioned, I took a shot of the fire.
We went to the south end of the platform, then a volunteer wet it down to give us some texture.
We went through quite a few iterations of this setup, as both the volunteers in the scene and the assembled photographers all shuffled around to give us a variety of shots.
I did edit a few shots with a darker, more blueish tint. I’m not sure I prefer it, because it removes the small amount of Freshwater‘s green livery, but it makes for an interesting look nonetheless.
Eventually someone showed up with a lamp, which we managed to get reflected off the wet platform.
At this point, we moved up to the other end of the train to focus more on the people and one of the wagons.
We moved over onto Platform 4 to get similar shots from that side. Some lights were set up to help light the scene.
Another member of the station crew came in, and I liked how they ended up silhouetted against the steam.
In these shots, the darker editing seemed to compliment them better.
With the night drawing in and things getting a bit chilly, it would soon be time to call it a night. The last shot I squeezed off as people were starting to pack up was this shot of one of the Horsted Keynes railway signs, between two of the wagons.
This was another great night shoot, one in which I’d learned a lot from the previous ones. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been one at 2026’s autumn gala, so maybe there will be some others in 2027.
As ever, there are a few extra shots – as well as a few alternative edits – in the gallery below.
