The Stamford Train Station had their aging steel bridge spans replaced with new cast concrete products. This Summer I was selected by DroneUp to be part of an exciting project that involved capturing the replacement of six concrete bridge spans that supported five train tracks over Atlantic Ave. in Stamford, Connecticut. The project took place on three days over the 4th of July holiday week and involved flying my drone during daylight and nighttime hours. Berard – The Mega Transport Experts out of New Iberia, Louisiana was the company that I was hired to video tape and capture photographs of their heavy duty machinery moving these massive bridge spans from a staging area into the final destination on Atlantic Ave.
Stamford Train Station Transition
There was a lot of coordination that needed to take place between all the contractors on site to make this a smooth transition that would not cause too much of a delay in daily train traffic. The first night began right around sunset as the first span was slowly moved into place and by midnight the second span was set into place. The tough part for me was living about an hour and a half away, in good traffic, to the work site. I would get a call with about three hours to “go time” so I could plan my trip down. One night things were delayed to a point I needed to leave the house at 2:30 to be on site at 4am, that made for some beautiful sunrise photos and video. This move one just to get the next two spans from the staging area, nearly 3/4 of a mile away, down by the job site so when the call came to move them into place the spans were close by. Streets needed to be closed temporarily and traffic lights moved out of the way so these massive transport machines and their cargo could be moved along the roadway. Shooting this required me to safely navigate between high power utility lines over the trains tracks on one side and I-95 on the other.
The second two spans were moved into place on the west side of the bridge on the 4th of July, we began working around 4:30 that afternoon and moved the second span under darkness and a fireworks show from neighborhoods surrounding the job site. Friday was the final move of the last two spans and these two took the least amount of time to capture but was probably the most stressful. Each of the days prior to the final move the off ramp from I-95 was closed to traffic so I had a little buffer between the interstate, high tension lines and the work area, Friday they opened the off ramp to traffic exiting onto the service road making my flight area tighter than any other day, fortunately all the flights on this day were during daylight hours. I met and worked alongside some great people from Berard, Halmar International, Connecticut Department of Transportation and a host of other engineering and construction contractors involved. Samara Media, LLC, is proud to have been chosen for this drone mission.
Working alongside Berard’s Jody Hataway and his crew from Louisiana was a true pleasure. I brought along my Insta360 One X along to experiment a little. It’s an amazing little VR camera that captures 5.7K resolution 360 video at 30 fps and 18MP photos. I also brought my Panasonic Lumix GH5 mirrorless camera to add some ground based time-lapse video of the move.
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