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It’s funny how things work out. Last month, I spent the day at Petrified Forest National Park — my first visit there since the late 1990s — and my most vivid memory is of getting a lucky photo of a passing train.

Let me begin at the beginning.

Petrified Forest NP in east-central Arizona sits astraddle Interstate 40, not far from the New Mexico border. The region is classified as “native Arizona grassland,” which you can take to mean a parched, treeless, windblown desert populated by rocks, tumbleweeds, and a suitably hardy selection of plants and animals.

In the hierarchy of national parks, Petrified Forest is not a hugely-revered national jewel or a top-tier destination.

In fact, the Park is a bit of a one-trick pony; you go there to see the countless petrified logs, sprawled at random across the barren landscape — which now, ages after they were formed, ironically is treeless.

In fairness, if you count the considerable number of petroglyphs on view among the rocks, maybe the park is a two-trick pony.

Really, I don’t make these observations with malice. The Park has limited interest, but that’s okay. It is what it is, and that, in fact, is pretty remarkable.

The Park does a good job of presenting itself to visitors. It covers roughly 150 square miles and features a main north-south road 28 miles long.

The place is designed around a succession of parking lots, where one leaves one’s vehicle and sets off down paved loop trails to see the namesake logs up close. The system works fine.

Except in the rain.

Due to its desert location, the Park experiences precious few rainy days. But, as I learned last month, a rainy day there leaves you car-bound and seriously bummed out.

Let me set the scene about Petrified Forest NP and the abundance of fossilized logs it protects.

Most of the petrified trees in the Park are from the pine and fern families. They lived during the Late Triassic period, about 225 million years ago.

At the time, that region of the globe was located near the equator, on the supercontinent of Pangaea. The first dinosaurs and the earliest crocodiles were evolving. The climate was sub-tropical and humid.

The trees became petrified via a process called permineralization, which worked this way:

— When trees in the huge forests died and fell, some were carried downstream by creeks and rivers. Along the way, most of the logs were stripped of bark and branches.

— Eventually, the trees became wedged in great logjams and could go no further.

— Wood lying on the Earth’s surface will deteriorate, but some of the logs became buried in sediment, where, deprived of oxygen, the wood was preserved.

— There underground, water in the sediment percolated gently through the cells of the wood.

— Under the right conditions, minerals in the water — silica, quartz, manganese, carbon — slowly replaced the organic material of the tree, while the plant retained its original structure and appearance.

— The result was petrified wood: trees with cells of stone.

All of this, of course, took place below the surface. It took ages of uplifting and erosion to bring the petrified logs, some whole, some in chunks, some in fragments, to the surface.

The area was well-known long before it was established as a National Monument in 1906. How well-known was it? Well, the NM designation was intended to stop the systematic removal of petrified wood in large-scale commercial operations.

Petrified wood rapidly became a hot commodity, valuable enough to attract hoards of well-organized profiteers who mined it and sold it around the country.

In 1962, the NM was elevated to National Park status. By then, the commercial looting was more or less under control.

But the Park has continued to rail about the consequences of visitors illegally pocketing souvenir pieces of petrified wood. They say tourists steal about 12 tons of it per year.

Clearly, walking off with souvenirs is destructive and wrong. But is 12 tons annually all that consequential, out of a Park of 150 square miles? Remember, in the early years, countless wagonloads of petrified wood were stolen from the region daily.

Is it consequential? Maybe so, when you consider that most thefts by tourists occur from the most important, most visited sites in the facility.

Personally, I have resolved to be a good citizen who does not purloin artifacts. On this trip, I avoided the temptation of illegally taking home a piece of petrified wood by purchasing a souvenir chunk at the Visitor Center.

My prize is a nicely polished $2.00 specimen with a magnet glued to the back, which now resides on my refrigerator.

My day at Petrified Forest National Park did not begin well. It was a gloomy Wednesday morning when I left my hotel in Winslow and drove to the southern entrance to the Park.

By the time I arrived, so had a light rain.

I pulled up to the entrance station and reached for my Golden Age Passport, the lifetime National Parks entrance pass to which us old-timers are entitled, and to which the rest of you can only aspire.

The pass wasn’t there. I had left it in my hotel room.

The ranger lady at the gate listened to my sad story.

“I really do have a Golden Age Passport,” I moaned. “In fact, I have two of them. I went to Grand Canyon a few years ago, and I left my parks pass at home, so I had to buy a second one. I keep one in each car now, but I only brought one on this trip, and I left that in my room at the La Posada Hotel in Winslow. Please don’t make me buy a third one.”

The ranger lady stood with her forearm resting on the sill of the open window with practiced ease, nodding.

“Well,” she said finally, “With this rain, it ain’t much of a day for seein’ the place.”

She handed me a map of the Park. “But go ahead in.”

For the next hour-plus, I drove north through the Park, stopping at each parking lot/loop trail on the map. I peered wistfully into the gloom at the vague outlines of petrified logs dotting the distant hillsides.

Several times, I lowered the car window and took a photo, or pulled close enough to a roadside display to read it. But the drive, all in all, was hugely depressing.

However, by the time I reached the north end of the Park, the rain had stopped.

My plan had been to exit the Park at the north end, return in defeat to Winslow, and have a beer. But, hey — why not turn around and drive back south through the Park to try again?

Figuring I would get some lunch and stretch my legs first, I stopped at the North Entrance visitor center.

At the front door, I was greeted by a sign that said, PAY ENTRANCE FEE OR SHOW PREPAID PASS AT FRONT DESK.

Instead of going inside, I pretended I forgot something, went back to the car, and drove away slowly.

My second drive through the Park was as satisfying as the first had been dismal. I stopped at the same parking lots again — all of which I entered backwards, so they seemed new — and I walked the loop trails and took photos like a proper tourist.

In that last photo, the various colors are created by different minerals. Yellow, brown, and orange come from goethite, a common iron-rich oxide. White is produced by pure silica. Red is created by hematite, a form of oxidized iron that develops with minimal oxygen. (Think of iron stains in a porcelain sink.)

At the beginning of my tale, I mentioned a lucky photo of a passing train.

I took the photo from atop a bridge where the main park road, going north-south, crosses over the east-west tracks of the BNSF Railroad.

That afternoon, while returning south, I saw the train on my left, approaching from the north, still a great distance out. I was alone on the road.

Idling in my car on top of the bridge, I got out my camera (a Canon point-and-shoot that performed better than I expected on that trip) and zoomed in.

No, too far away. Not a good shot.

I hesitated to step out of the vehicle to get a photo, so I pulled the car over into the wrong lane, next to the north side of the bridge. If a car came along, I would have time to move.

The train came steadily closer. It was a diesel freight train, the kind you see regularly crossing the country, loaded with double-stacked containers bearing the names of companies — Maersk and Hanjin and such — that we don’t know beans about.

I zoomed in slightly, held my camera in the air to avoid the bridge railing, and fired off a shot.

Drat! I cut off half the engine.

The train was getting closer. I backed off on the zoom and repeated the procedure.

Dang! Out of focus.

By then, the train was looming in front of me, just short of the bridge, traveling at whatever hair-raising speed trains travel on a straightaway in the desert.

I had one last chance to get a photo, and I was rattled. I didn’t have time to think or to adjust the camera — only to fire. I raised my left arm out of the window and pointed the camera at the train.

The engineer, seeing a car paused on the bridge, gave a deafening blast of the horn. The sound buffeted the car as the train rumbled under the bridge.

As the train receded to the west, I snapped two more photos, both forgettable.

Then I checked the camera and found this photo — level, sharp, and well-framed, but owing entirely to blind luck.