My brother and I were changing trains at Washington D.C. on December 18, 1984. I had time to stealthily wander down the platforms and make photos of the Alco RS-1s that worked the station. I was pleased to feature three of the enigines in one image.
Alcos on the old Fallbrook Route.
In October 2007, I was working on my Railroad’s of Pennsylvania book, when Pat Yough and I made a very productive chase of Tioga Central’s excursion train, which operated, from Wellsboro Junction, Pennsylvania compass north along the old New York Central Fallbrook route (including over a Penn-Central-era line relocation).
Back in the mid-1980s, I failed to take the opportunity to chase an empty Conrail coal train down the line south of Gang Mills Yard (near Corning, New York). At the time the line still went all the way to Newberry Junction, near Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
Conrail operated ENSY/SYEN (Enola-Syracuse) manifest trains on this route three days a week, plus unit coal trains.
I’d been standing at the bridge (now gone) at the east end of Conrail’s Gang Mills Yard. There were two trains coming. A westward double stack on the former Erie route, and a southward unit coal train heading down the Fallbrook. I opted to follow the stack train because I didn’t have a good map of Pennsylvania.
Six months later Conrail abandoned the Fallbrook as a through route, and lifted the line south of Wellsboro through the super-scenic Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania.
While, I’ve since chased Wellsboro & Corning freights and the Tioga Central excursion, I’ve always regretted my poor decision that day. A map, a map, my kingdom for a map!
An RS-1 wearing a Lehigh Valley-inspired livery leads a Tioga Central excursion north of Wellsboro Junction on October 7, 2007. I’d just bought a second-hand 24mm Canon lens from Thom Kinard, and this was a good opportunity to try it out on Canon EOS 3 loaded with Fujichrome.
Binghamton, New York, December 1986.
It was a cold and snowy day when I drove from Rochester to Binghamton, New York in December 1986. I photographed several trains along the former Erie Southern Tier route.
In the afternoon, I made this study of a New York, Susquehanna & Western Alco RS-1 at the railroad’s Binghamton yard.
I was using my dad’s Rollei Model T loaded with 120 Kodachrome 64. I had the camera fitted with a ‘Super Slide’ insert that gave me 16 rectangular frames per roll, roughly in the 645 format. Pop had bought the camera in Germany back in 1960.
I think its neat that my father had photographed Susquehanna’s RS-1s in passenger service more than 25 years earlier with the same camera. Since I was only 20 then, it seemed to me that the locomotives (and the Rollei) had been around since the dawn of time!
This batch of Kodak 120 Kodachrome had a tendency to color shift red, so after scanning I made some corrections in post processing. Other than that the image is extremely sharp. Scanned at 4800 dpi as TIF file this is nearly 250 MB. That’s an enormous amount of information.
I’ve always liked locomotive details. Some of my earliest efforts focused on engine shapes.
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Many years ago my dad advised me, ‘photograph everything, because everything changes’. In October 2002, I made this photograph of Green Mountain Railroad’s excursion train passing the wooden covered truss at Bartonsville, Vermont. At the time this was a seasonal daily occurrence. While I was fond of the vintage Alco diesel, there was nothing unusual about the scene, and there was no special urgency in capturing the moment. Today, this image is a prize, but not for the Alco, which remains in excellent condition—I photographed it again last summer at White River Junction where it was positioned to power a Vermont Rail System excursion. The old covered bridge is only a memory today. It stood here since the 1870s, but on August 28, 2011 it was swept away by flood waters caused by Hurricane Irene. Its temporary replacement wasn’t as interesting to photograph; thankfully a replica truss bridge is under construction.
