Have you considered getting a line scan camera for sharper and higher resolution images? I took some train scans with one: https://daniel.lawrence.lu/photos/
Technically, the photo could be twice the resolution, since the length of the line scan sensor is 4096. It consists of two lines, RGRGRG and GBGBGB. By interpolating the red and blue channels, it would be possible to get images 4096 pixels tall. The challenge is that the two green channels apparently have quite different sensitivity and also each pixel has some variation in sensitivity, which also seems to drift with temperature and settings, so it's quite annoying to calibrate everything properly haha.
I'm a big fan of Wes Anderson's aesthetics and would love to shoot that funicular train from Grand Budapest Hotel (which actually exists --- the Buda Hill funicular) using my line scan camera.
Wow, the pictures look amazing!
Yes, the look of line scan images were an inspiration for this project. But of course, I also tried to keep BOM costs down and so ended up with a RP4 + RPi Camera.
The RPi HQ camera is a nice step up from the regular RPi camera while being not too expensive too. Incidentally, I also have a project using that [0] but unfortunately no trains where I live.
Have you tried the opposite direction? Sitting on the train with the line feed and taking a picture of outside? Like say, a panorama view of the entire run-length of the line, distorted in proportion to the trains turns and accelerations.
I love how the line scan camera’s horizontal background makes it look like the trains are moving impossibly fast. Not only are the images sharp & high res, it has a great aesthetic and implies you were tracking an action shot.
I remember seeing your photographs on Wikimedia Commons and wondering how you did them - now I know! I always assumed that you just used a very quick shutter with an f-stop of zero :)
When the train is moving at a constant speed, you can just scale the image manually to make it just right. If it's moving at a non-constant speed, you can apply a spline or similar to remove the distortion.
Incidentally I also built some tech for it: https://github.com/dllu/nectar but I need to update the readme...