Steamscape: Crown Point. The reconstructed Virginia & Truckee Railroad is one of my favorite steam operations in all of the US. Why? Well, because it is one of the few places where you can photograph working steam in vast and interesting landscapes. Photo opportunities abound all over this line. This image is a good example of what I mean. Here, we see a little V&T freight, dominated by the local terrain of the Comstock Region, with the High Sierras as a backdrop. This area is called Crown Point, and as is plainly evident just about all of the local environs have been literally turned upside-down by mining activities over the past 150 years. Just to the left of the train, you see the remains of the Crown Point Mine, once a major source of silver and gold, now abandoned. Behind the train by perhaps 200 yards, is a large, deep, open-pit mine called Overman Pit. Just ahead of the train, the flat area featuring the brighter, yellow sand, is the Crown Point Fill. Once a deep ravine, traversed by a 350 ft. long, 85 ft. high wooden railroad trestle, now filled in with mine tailings. The landscape here has been changed so much over the years, that it no longer looks like it did when the original V&T ran through here in the late 1800s and early 1900s, much less the way Mother Nature made it.
