In spring of 1993, while I was attending SMU, I photographed this sequence as part of an assignment for my Color Photography II class. The assignment was to produce a single piece consisting of multiple images.

As I drove along the tracks near Santa Fe's Zacha Jct yard in east Dallas / Garland, I noticed that a full moon was rising, and I stopped to set up my tripod to get a few shots of the moonrise behind a pair of signals. I wasn't even expecting a train, but I lucked out when one showed up just as I set up the shot. I slowed down the shutter speed to one second or so, and fired away as a Dallas, Garland & Northeastern train rolled past.

Frame 1 (from left) was taken immediately before the train began passing. Frames 2 and 3 capture the locomotives, the car in frame 4 is an empty center-beam flat, and the car in frame 5 is a gondola. Note that by the fourth and fifth frames, the moon has "risen" into the power line. I can't really account for the moon being higher in frame 4 than in frame 5, except to guess that the wind might have been blowing the wires, making the moon *appear* slightly higher in the fourth frame. (Or maybe I got the frames mixed up!)

The original version of this image was five 8 x 10 photos placed next to each other on a long piece of mat board. The complete piece was almost four feet long! This scan was made from a smaller version of the same image, which I believe was done with 3 ½ x 5 size photos dry-mounted on textured gray paper. Excuse the crappy scan; it wouldn't all fit on the flatbed for a single scan, so I had to paste three separate scans together in my photo editor!