Following up on Saturday’s post of the MBTA at Norfolk, Massachusetts, I thought I’d post this photo that I made of a Conrail local working at Franklin, Massachusetts in November 1984.

This is looking west where the tracks run parallel with East Street, at the junction between former New Haven Railroad’s New York & New England route running west toward Willimantic, Connecticut and the New Haven Branch to Milford, Massachusetts (since upgraded for MBTA service to Forge Park/495.)

I’d exposed this photograph on black & white film using a Leica 3A rangefinder fitted with a Canon screw mount 50mm f1.8 lens. For a few months, I used the Canon lens as a replacment for my Leica 50mm f2.0 Summitar that I’d damaged.

The Canon lens was faster than the Summitar but lacked the critical sharpness of the Leica lens. As a result, this period of photography has great interest to me in regards to subject matter, but suffers from inferior technical quality than some of my earlier work.

It took a few years, but ultimately I made significant changes in the equipment that I was using that greatly improved the technical quality of my photograhy.

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