A very interesting exercise this.  I visited the Jinxi Railway just once in March 2005.  It was a pretty dull day, with the overcast getting worse as the day went on.

One of the things I love about digital photography is you just keep on learning. 

 It's that time – looking back across an old year done and wondering what the next will bring.  So I’ve been looking back across the crop of railway pictures I took in 2008.

More older picture mining - this time of our visit to the Tiefa Coal Railway in China in March 2005. 

It continues to amaze me how Photoshop and Raw Converters have progressed over three years - some of these frames were unusable at the time they were taken. 

Big lesson here - always shoot Raw - there's almost always a way of recovering even the biggest technical blunders.

Tangshan is a heavily industrialised mining city in the east of China that had been known as one of the real hotspots for Chinese steam.

The Nanpiao Coal Railway is located In Liaoning Province in the east of China. I've visited twice - in March 2005 and January 2008.

It's a great mix of a regular steam-operated passenger service and fairly frequent coal trains. The system passes through some beautiful rural countryside and some highly industrial areas.