December 2012
-
Irish Rail—Cherryville Junction, 6 December 2003
.
In 2003, Irish Rail operated its sugar beet trains via Kildare because the normal routing between Waterford and Limerick Junction was closed as result of a bridge collapse at Cahir, County Tipperary. On December 6, 2003, I was in place…
-
Santa Fe at Christie, California, March 18, 1993.
.
In the mid-1990s, I often photographed Santa Fe in the bucolic splendor of Franklin Canyon. While I made many images of Santa Fe’s trains, for me this atmospheric image captures the wonderful quality of the place and I featured it…
-
Dublin’s Harcourt Street at Dusk
.
There are very few places where I my memory predates the railway. However, Dublin‘s LUAS tram system (opened in 2004) offers one example. I made my first photos of Harcourt Street in March 1998. It was a rainy evening, and I was…
-
Christmas Cat on the Track Video
.
I filmed this lite video Christmas morning using my Lumix LX3 and Canon 7D. Check it out on YouTube: Christmas Cat on the Track Video Enjoy! Related articles Christmas Day 1982; Warren, Massachusetts Cuernavaca, Mexico, December 1979 Main Line Position…
-
Red Locomotives in the Snow; Mt Holly, Vermont
.
Vermont Rail System freight 263 led by former Texas Mexican GP60 381 works on Green Mountain Railroad’s former Rutland grade near Mt Holly, Vermont on February 18, 2002. Fresh powder, a clear blue dome combined with red locomotives and tonnage…
-
Christmas Day 1982; Warren, Massachusetts
.
Merry Christmas from Brian Solomon! Are you enjoying Tracking the Light? Please forward a link to this site to anyone and everyone who would enjoy seeing it! Cheers! http://briansolomon.com/trackingthelight/ Related articles Locomotive Geometry: Part 1 Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited…
-
Cuernavaca, Mexico, December 1979
.
On Christmas Day 1979, I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Mexico City on an Eastern Airlines Lockheed L-1011 Tristar. At Mexico City airport I met my uncle and we spent a week wandering around. Among our adventures…
-
Erie Railroad’s Portage Bridge; May 12, 2007
.
During the second week of May 2007, I was in western New York to photograph for my book The Railroad Never Sleeps. This project involved coordinating 37 photographers across North America who produced railroad images on May 10th — the…
-
Railway Preservation Society Ireland 461 Follow Up
.
As a follow up to my November 7, 2012 post Irish Rail in November Light , I thought I’d post a scan of a slide I made the same day as the digital photos. RPSI 461 was its way back to…
-
Locomotive Geometry Part 2; Wisconsin & Southern’s Electro-Motive diesels
.
Finding static locomotives in nice light offers an opportunity to make studies of the equipment. Wisconsin & Southern operated a fleet of clean, well-maintained second-hand General Motors Electro-Motive Division (EMD) diesels. These were representative of the classic models built at…
-
Iconic San Francisco Silhouette
.
On the afternoon of August 21, 2009, I worked San Francisco’s famous hills aiming to make images of Muni’s cable cars, arguably one of America’s most pictured railway operations. I set the exposure manually using the camera’s spot meter to…
-
Main Line Position Lights on Borrowed Time
.
Anticipating change is key to documenting the railroad. In nearly three decades of photography along the former Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line, I’ve tuned my images to clues of this route’s past. While the PRR vanished into Penn Central in 1968,…
-
Locomotive Geometry: Part 1
.
Locomotives have long been the subjects of photographic study. The earliest images are believed to be Daguerreotypes from the early 1850s. As early as the 1860s, locomotive manufacturers routinely photographed locomotives to document their construction and to help interest prospective…
-
Steam at Dusk, December 15, 2012
.
Last night (December 15, 2012) I made this atmospheric image of Valley Railroad 3025 at Essex, Connecticut before it departed with one of the railroad’s popular North Pole Express excursions. I felt that evening twilight and the crescent moon…
-
Amtrak P42 Number 1 Panned at Speed
.
This image was part of a sequence aimed to fulfill a commission by Mark Hemphill when he was Editor of TRAINS Magazine. While one of the other images in the sequence eventually appeared in the magazine, a tightly cropped version…
-
Contax G2 with Agfa Scala Transparency Film
.
I often make interesting images when I’m just playing around. Between 2001 and 2007 I regularly worked with a Contax G2 rangefinder and I typically used it to expose either Fuji color slide film or black & white negatives. One…
-
Railroad in a Modern Environment?
.
Yesterday (Wednesday Dec 12, 2012) I made productive use of winter light while photographing between Ayer, Fitchburg and Gardner, Massachusetts. Where many of my images focused on the railroad, delineating it from its surroundings, on reviewing my work, this scene…
-
Out on ‘the beet’—turning muck into gold
.
One of my favorite late-season projects was documenting Irish Rail’s annual sugar-beet campaign. This combined many of my railway interests in one action-intensive activity. Sugar beet was delivered to the station at Wellingtonbridge County, Wexford and loaded into antique purpose-built…
-
Erie October Morning
.
Since the mid-1980s, I’ve made a project out of the former Erie Railroad. (See posts: Curiously Seeking Erie Semaphores and Erie Semaphores Revisited). For more than two decades, I’ve examined the old Erie route on film, exploring its lines across its…
-
Sunset at Bonn, Germany, August 1998
.
In August 1998, I was visiting a friend in Bonn, Germany. I’d wandered down the Rhein by train with a promise to return by dinner at 8 in the evening. At Mainz, I bought a ticket for an IC (Intercity)…
-
New England Central at Millers Falls, Massachusetts, December 9, 2012
.
This morning (December 9, 2012), New England Central 603 worked north from Palmer, Massachusetts to the Pan Am Railways interchange at Millers Falls. To pick up and drop cars, the train worked a north-facing switch that required it to pull…
-
Derelict Steam Locomotive Poland, May 2000
.
I made my first trip to Poland in May 2000; while part of my quest was to experience steam in revenue service, among the most compelling images I made were of derelict engines such as this one in Silesia. I…
-
Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited catches the glint at Palmer, May 28, 1986.
.
On this warm May evening in 1986, I exposed a trailing view of Amtrak’s westward Lake Shore Limited as it hits the Central Vermont diamond at Palmer. The train radiates the glint of the setting sun. Between eastward and westward…
-
Opportunity at the Willows, December 5, 2012
.
Every so often trains converge and pause, presenting opportunities to make interesting and dramatic images. Such was the case yesterday, December 5, 2012, at the junction known as ‘the Willows’ east of Ayer, Massachusetts (where the former Boston & Maine…
-
Dublin’s Heuston Station, February 2003.
.
Here are a few photos from a roll of 35mm B&W film that for all intents and purposes has never seen the light of day until now. Why? Back when I exposed them, the trains pictured were the most mundane-sort…
-
Southern Pacific SD45s on Kodachrome
.
Southern Pacific Daylight in California’s Central Valley It was a clear bright evening, and rather than continue our pursuit of 4449 we opted to remain at the east switch at Brock for a few freight trains that were pending. (As…
-
Classic General Motors Locomotives: Monday December 3, 2012
.
As I write this I’m eagerly anticipating arrival of an Author’s Copy of my latest book: North American Locomotives published by Voyageur Press. This morning, while I was polishing off some text and captions for another future Voyageur Press project, tentatively…
-
Palmer, Massachusetts 11:01pm November 30, 2012
.
It’s late, it’s dark, and it’s bitterly cold (ok, it’s been colder). I’m tired and I’m in Palmer where I’ve made countless thousands of images. I left my tripod at home. However, I’ve been eying the odd wintry textured sky,…