On this day in 1996, I was driving from Wisconsin to Massachusetts in a U-Haul truck with most of my worldly belongings (including the majority of my photographs).
Would you believe me if I told you that I took a detour to follow the old Erie Railroad main line across New York’s Southern Tier, and when I heard on the scanner that an eastward coal train was through Hornell, I drove the U-Haul into a grave yard on the banks of the Canisteo River, climbed a tree and exposed this series of color slides?
At 9:35 am on September 5, 1987, I was standing on the old bridge over Conrail’s former Erie Railroad mainline at Carsons, east of Canisteo.
Heavy fog over New York’s Canisteo Valley was lifting as the late-summer monring sun peaked out from behind some clouds.
A westward empty Delaware & Hudson coal train from New England led by Pittsburg & Lake Erie GP38/GP38-2ss was roaring west, as a Sealand double-stack with New York, Susquehanna & Western former Burlington Northern SD45s glided below me.
I had my Leica M2 loaded with Kodachrome 25. In my haste to capture the scene, I’d failed to take into account the effects of fog and bright morning sun. The result was a very over-exposed color slide. Since the very nature of the Kodachrome process linked saturation with exposure, my photograph has a bleached look to it.
For more than 36 years this languished in a file of rejected slides. I nearly pitched it in a purge of my collection back in the early 1990s.
The only reason I kept it was because—despite its technical flaws—it had captured the spirit of the moment.
The other night, I scanned the image and then imported the hi-res scan into Adobe Lightroom for some necessary posts processing corrections.
Thirty-five years ago today, March 23, 1988, at 8:16am, I exposed this Kodachrome 25 slide of Conrail’s TV-300 roaring east on the former Erie Railroad mainline east of Adrian, New York in the Canisteo River Valley.
I was perched upside a hill with my Leica M2 fitted to a Visoflex with Leitz 200mm Telyt lens mounted on a tripod.
I’d driven down in the early morning from my apartment in Scottsville, New York, having scoped out this spot several weeks before.
I arrived about 10-15 minutes ahead of the train, which I could hear from several miles away; the rolling thunder of the stack wells behind a classic throbbing of EMD diesels.
A little more than a decade later, I returned to this place with photographer Mike Gardner and repeated the exercise with an eastward CP Rail freight. By that time Conrail had reduced the old Erie to single track.
