About

This blog supports my YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/c/krdcountry ‘the home of beautiful movies of trains’.

I use this blog to write ‘the making of’ stories behind my videos. Some of you may find these stories more interesting than the videos themselves!

I also be talk about the equipment I use and the manner in which I use it (without claiming to be a technical expert, my comments will be based on my experiences).

I have long had an interest in photography and have been ‘seriously’ taking photographs for more than 40 years. My experience with videography is somewhat erratic, starting with some high school adventures that introduced me to the wonderful world of video (in an era when video equipment was large, cumbersome, expensive and of lamentably poor quality compared with today’s offerings), through to random uses of such equipment starting with my Russian holiday adventure in 2007. With the arrival of digital cameras I re-embraced the world of video and have now moved most of my photography to that medium.

I regularly publish a new movie on my YouTube channel, krdcountry tv. The videos are generally of short duration (3 – 10 minutes is typical) and each one is devoted to a specific area or theme. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and many of the videos have been shot in and around Melbourne, or in regional areas in close proximity to Melbourne. However, I regularly travel elsewhere, both to other Australian locations and also occasionally overseas, and videos from those journeys can also be found on the channel. 

As a sample, here is a video that was published on 18 April 2016 that was shot at Tottenham, in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, during the last weeks of summer. Tottenham is a large and sprawling marshalling yard that is now largely redundant. It is mostly used for storage of unneeded rolling stock and as a staging post for broad gauge freight trains, very few of which still operate in the state of Victoria. The interstate standard gauge line runs along the northern edge of the yard and, at its western end, is the junction for the lines to Sydney and Adelaide. The northern side of the yard adjoins a residential area with open or park land beside the line. Unusually for Melbourne, this area is actually fenced (most railway lines in Melbourne are not fenced).

This video features a number of trains that could be seen during the late afternoon at the time this website was launched, although the timing of some of them was such that they didn’t run each day. Included here is the Overland, Great Southern Railway’s Adelaide – Melbourne service that still runs only twice each week, V/Line’s Albury passenger train and NSW TrainLink’s Sydney – Melbourne XPT (both run every day), Pacific National’s MA5 Melbourne – Adelaide freight train (M -F), Aurizon’s MB7 to Brisbane (at that time running 6 days/week), SCT’s ‘Wimmera Intermodal’ train (5 days/week) and Aurizon’s then shuttle service from SCT’s depot at Laverton to North Dynon (the wagons were then added to MB7). Aurizon discontinued intermodal services at the end of 2017 but reintroduced such trains after winning a haulage contract with Team Global Express, with the first new service being launched in April 2023.

The video was shot with my Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera in ‘film’ mode.