This is one of my few night/dusk train photos on film. The cost of film and processing inhibited opportunities to learn night photography via experimentation. The short exposures needed to limit movement blur also limit how much light reaches the film which leaves its grain more obvious. The grain appears as random, visual static or snow.

A sunset sky can provide backlighting needed for silhouettes.

This wasn't supposed to be a dusk photo, but the sounds of train horns carry far in the Patapsco Valley. It was over 20 minutes from when I heard CSX 243's horn to when it emerged from Davis Tunnel. By then, too little light remained to illuminate the setting.

I had moved to digicams before 2006. CSX 6010 was stationary at photo time.

If you don't bring your own lighting, you must rely on other sources. Many rail yards provide overhead lighting -- but reasonable railfan vantage points are usually few. Note that nighttime railfanning is uncommon, so you are more likely to make railroad personnel nervous than during the day.

The longer a camera lens is open, the more ambient light it can gather, however anything longer than about 0.02 seconds (1/50th second) requires an impossibly steady hand to avoid camera movement that produces blur. A tripod becomes essential at night. This photo was hastily shot with the camera on a tripod, hence the leaning angle.

Stations are often well lit. Cameras with built-in low-light modes will automatically adjust the exposure duration to something reasonable. This 1-second exposure turned out slightly darker than I preferred, so it was digitally brightened, as indicated with the Exposure data above. Except where noted, photos on this page have not been digitally brightened in order to show what digicams natively produce.

This one is a longer exposure and not digitally brightened in post production.

The bright overhead light and platform caused the camera to shorten the exposure. Consider activating the camera's timer instead of pressing the shutter button because the latter can shake the camera.

Lamps generally do not produce the full spectrum of the Sun, so colors look unnatural. Post production can recolor photos, but I left these as is to illustrate them in unmodified form. Since photo time, whiter LED illumination has replaced many sodium vapor lamps. Sodium lamps became popular during the 1980s when they took the place of mercury vapor streetlights that generated a dimmer, bluish tint.

Moving trains are sufficiently energetic to vibrate the ground under your tripod, thus generating another source of blur. The train was moving so blurring is expected on it, but the rest of the objects are blurred due to vibration.

Autofocus often has trouble finding things to focus upon in low-light conditions. You'll want to switch to manual focus at an infinite distance.

CSX's then-new signals here had not yet been activated. Despite 2 seconds of exposure, this shot came out quite dark. Salvaging is sometimes possible by post production brightening but often amplifies or introduces noise, as demonstrated at left.

This random noise is light from parallel universes (yes, really, see my book). You can also see it directly by looking around an almost completely dark room: notice that dark areas are not smoothly gray but rather slightly speckled or snowy. This is a consequence of what is called quantum uncertainty.

A camera's built-in flash can brighten close objects, however it won't generate enough light to illuminate an entire railcar.

Harwood reports using the "open flash" technique for this photo: the camera lens is held open while one or more flashbulbs illuminate the subject.

Similar can be accomplished today with bright flashlights.

Link: flashbulb primer

For the first time in anyone's memory, the Bollman bridge at Savage was decorated with lights for the 2013 holidays. Most bridges move more slowly than trains, so there's less risk of blur on long exposures.

The Sun provides not only light but heat which means night photography during winter can get chilly more quickly than one might anticipate. I had begun to shiver during this expedition, but luckily there was a convenient railing nearby to steady the camera.

Holiday deocrations are another place to find trains at night, sometimes complete with steam and smoke.

Trains moving toward or away from the camera move less across the field of view than does the train's side. Consequently, your best bet with moving trains in low light is to capture the front or rear end. A 1/250th second exposure like this is too long for an unblurred side view of all but very slowly moving trains.

Close headlights can overwhelm a photo at dusk.

Your night-photo practice will come in handy on cloudy winter days, too.

The "High-speed shutter" mode of Sony's H1 to H5 digicams knows to use a short exposure despite the limited light an hour after sunset. This is an excellent representation of what this scene had looked like to the human eye.

Too bad Sony did not carry the "High-speed shutter" feature to its later cameras. It automatically captured with almost no motion blur this Amtrak train operating at roughly 60 mph.

You can obtain a dusk shot like this with Sony's newer cameras only via manual settings. Semi-automatic operation, such as setting the exposure duration, is insufficient because the camera will try to make the scene brigher by opening the lens wider (a smaller F stop) and shifting to a higher ISO. You can override some of that, but doing so takes practice plus at some point it feels like you are fighting the camera.

Despite decades of train watching, I'd seen just one 9000-numbered CSX locomotive in revenue service, so of course the second example arrived in the dark.

I'd manually set the 1/250th second exposure in order to learn what my then-new Sony RX10 camera would do. The RX10 has a bigger lens and light sensor than my prior camera, and offers higher ISOs, in this case 12800. The camera opened the lens wide and went to max ISO, but there was just too little light for anything but a mood or artistic photo.

Link: at night 2023

For this one, I let the camera decide the exposure duration. It illustrates how far a train can move in 1/10th of a second -- and this is a freight that's pokey by comparison to Amtrak.

At night, any uncommon light source, such as lightning, can make a photo more interesting.

I've yet to capture what I'd consider a decent lightning photo, even one without trains. I've come close to getting hit by lightning, however, once within 6 feet, another time less than 1 foot. Close up, the bolts appear as thin as a pencil.

The 1/6th second exposure was chosen automatically along with an ISO of 12800.

The lunar (white) signal represents "Restricting" that tells operators to be ready to stop upon sighting an obstruction. CSX signals typically transition from Red to Restricting (red over lunar) to Approach (orange over red). A train had cleared this signal 90 seconds prior.

The camera chose 1/13th of a second. Sometimes you can minimize blur on a certain area by carefully turning the camera to track a moving subject during the exposure.

It will take more trial and error to produce a wow-worthy night train photo.

Fireworks are made for wows. A short duration exposure captures the bright bits in a single location.

A long duration exposure lets the sparks (and the camera) move for unpredictable, sometimes fun results.

Instead of moving fireworks, you can be moving, such as in a car heading into Ellicott City, B&O's first terminus, just don't expect to capture anything in sharp focus.

A real lunar aspect appears almost nightly. This is a 1/1000th second exposure with the RX10 held in hand with manual settings.

Before getting trackside at night, you'll want to experiment nearer home with your camera. Each model has unique quirks in low light. If a busy street is nearby, consider its automobiles as test subjects for various camera settings.