P95265 - GWR no. 3850 enters Greet Tunnel, Gloucestershire - Lineside - Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway

This was taken from a brake van on a freight working from Cheltenham to Toddington, during the line's "Cotswold Festival of Steam" event, and shows the locomotive entering the north portal of the tunnel.  I'd deliberately slowed the exposure time to down in an attempt to create a camera blur effect.

I had attempted something similar in 2016 (see previous), but in that instance I was slightly to the side of the locomotive.  In this instance, I managed to get more central (possibly because none of the other passengers wanted my spot).  This was not any easy thing to do as it was not exactly the smoothest of rides, and I shot several sequences during the trip; I think this is one of the better images.

This has been one of most heavily re-worked images I've ever done as I felt that the original images had the components of something special; they were just in the wrong places.  The railway is actually laid on the left-hand side of the tunnel, and I'd managed to compose the shot with the loco on the left side rather than in the centre of the shot.  However, this meant that I'd captured the right-hand side of the tunnel portal, so I decided to move the locomotive more central to the shot.  This would create a gap on the left side that would need filling; in the end I felt the most reliable method was take the right-hand side of the tunnel portal and flip a copy to cover the left-hand side, and place the locomotive in the centre.  The blurring is "as taken".