Tag Archives: #C32-8

photography

Conrail C32-8s August 13, 1988.

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On the evening of August 13, 1988, I visited Conrail’s West Springfield Yard (Massachusetts) after a day on the old Boston & Albany ‘West End’.

At the time, General Electric six-motor diesels were standard power for road freights on the Boston Line.

Among the locomotives common to the Boston Line in the 1980s were the ten pre-prototype GE C32-8s that featured the ‘Classic’ curved roof cab and hump-back body style.

Significantly, these were among the first road-units with microprocessor controls.

I’ve covered these locomotives in several of my books over the years, and most recently in my new title Conrail and its Predecessors now available from Kalmbach Media.

https://kalmbachhobbystore.com/product/book/01309

These photos of Conrail 6618 were exposed on Professional Kodachrome 25 (PKM) color slide film and scanned using a Nikon Super Coolscan5000 digital scanner operated with VueScan software.

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photography

Conrail 6619 on the Boston & Albany.

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I made this image while hiking the line toward Middlefield, Massachusetts from Chester. The freight was descending the grade near where the 1912-line relocation joined the original Western Rail Road alignment (seen to the left of Conrail 6619) at milepost 129 (as measured from Boston’s South Station).

Conrail’s ten General Electric C32-8s were delivered in September 1984 and in their early years largely work out of Selkirk Yard on the old Boston & Albany route.

GE assigned these unique pre-production DASH8  prototypes to Conrail for evaluation in preparation for wide-scale DASH-8 production that began a few years later. 

I had countless encounters with the C32-8s on the Boston & Albany during the mid-1980s, but never had the opportunity to travel on one.

Later this year Kalmbach Media will release my new book titled Conrail and its Predecessors.

Tracking the Light Posts Every Day.