Tag Archives: Brooks Avenue

Brooks Avenue, Rochester, New York on a snowy Sunday Morning.

 

A classic Kodachrome color slide scanned then scaled for internet presentation.

It was a bright and clear Sunday morning in January 1988 when I exposed this Kodachrome 25 slide with my Leica M2 with 50mm Summicron at Rochester & Southern’s Brooks Avenue Yard near the Rochester Airport.

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DAILY POST: Rochester & Southern EMD Switcher


Brooks Avenue Yard, September 23, 1987.

Among my favorite locomotives are Electro-Motive’s classic end-cab switchers, of the sort introduced in the mid-1930s with EMC model SC.

I became familiar with this type as a result of an O-Gauge Lionel NW-2 dressed for Santa Fe that my father bought for me about 1972. Later, I watched and photographed full scale switchers on Penn-Central, Conrail and Boston & Maine.

This type in effect emulated the shape of the common steam locomotive, allowing the engineer to look down the length of the hood, instead of a boiler. Electro-Motive wasn’t first to use this arrangement, which Alco introduced in the early 1930s. But, it was the Electro-Motive switcher that I found to have a classic sound and shape.

EMD SW1200
Rochester & Southern SW1200 107 is posed in front of the Brooks Avenue yard office between 9:45 and 10:15 am on September 23, 1987. I made this photograph with a Leica M2 with 50mm Summicron lens on Kodachrome 25 slide film. At the time was doing a lighting test with my Sekonic Studio Deluxe light meter. Puffy clouds were rapidly passing over and intermittently blocking (and diffusing) the sunlight. I made careful notes of changes in exposure which varied by two full stops between ‘full sun’ and shaded. —
Incidentally, I published this image on page 53 of The American Diesel Locomotive (MBI Publishing, 2000).

 

 

When I was studying at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the late 1980s, Rochester & Southern’s Brooks Avenue Yard was just a few minutes away. I routinely stopped by the yard to see what was going on.

At that time, R&S 107—a former Southern Pacific SW1200—could be routinely found drilling cars. Over the years, I made a number of images of this old goat.

I left Rochester in 1989. I wonder what has become of this switcher? Does it still sport the SP-order oscillating lights?

See previous Tracking the Light posts:  Lehigh Valley 211 at Lincoln Park, Rochester, New York;  Genesee & Wyoming at P&L Junction, November 4, 1987; and Two Freights 24 Hours Apart

 

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