decaying railway | Tracking the Light

PKP Station Chojnów.

On the morning of April 29, 2002, I was changing trains with John Gruber and M. Ross Valentine at Chojnów, Poland. We were on our way from Żagań (Zagan) to Dresden, Germany. (see earlier post: PKP Class SU45 at Sunrise, Chojnów, Poland, April 29, 2002.)

The old station at Chojnow was once a fine facility but had seen better days. The tracks, although highly polished, were tired looking and overgrown with grass, the station building was in need of fresh paint, while the platforms were crumbing and everything was covered in layers of graffiti and grime.

In other words, it made for a fascinating place to make some photos with the rising sun while waiting for a minor cross-border express train. A long electric freight had just entered the passing siding to clear the mainline.

Sunrise at Chojnów, Poland on April 29, 2002; exposed on Fujichrome with a Nikon N90S fitted with a Nikkor f2.0 135mm DC ‘defocus’ telephoto. Using narrow depth of field, my intention with this image is draw attention to the freight train on the siding in the distance, thus making for a graphic photograph with multiple points of interest. I wonder how well this works on a small computer screen; my intended audience was using a slide projector in a darkened room with the image enlarged to more than four feet across. Sometimes these images make the media transition, other times, they don’t.

In the mid-2000s, PKP reminded me a lot of Penn-Central in the1970s.

In my travels around Poland, I’d photographed many stations and lines in various states of functional decay; a tenuous state. When a railway reaches such a condition, it will either vanish altogether, or find itself ripe for investment. In either case, it will be forever changed.

Sunrise at Chojnów, Poland on April 29, 2002; exposed on Fujichrome with a Nikon N90S fitted with a Nikkor f2.0 135mm DC ‘defocus’ telephoto.

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An Early Favorite.

Johnsonville_Nov4_1984_Brian Solomon — Exposed on Tri-X with a Leica 3A; image cropped slightly to correct for level, contrast adjusted locally in Photoshop.

Of my older black & white images, I feel this is among my most successful compositions. For me it goes beyond simple documentation of the railroad, yet captures the essence of Northeastern railroading in the early 1980s.

I’m standing in the ruined shell of the old Boston & Maine tower at Johnsonville, New York, where the line to Troy had diverged from the route to Mechanicville and Rotterdam.

In the tower’s broken windows, I’ve framed a distant eastward B&M freight (operated by Guilford Transportation Industries). The railroad, like the tower, is a shell of its former glory, having suffered from decades of decline. Yet, the trains still roll.

The stark, yet diffused November light adds to the scene and backlights the train illuminating the locomotive exhaust. Although the train is small, it is clearly the subject of the photo. The eye is immediately drawn to the locomotives and only later explores the rest of the image. I was particularly pleased with the placement of the old railings inside the tower.

For many years I had a 5×7 inch black and white print of this image on my wall.

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Tag Archives: decaying railway

Functional Decay: Poland.

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DAILY POST: Johnsonville, New York, November 4, 1984.

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Railway photography by Brian Solomon

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Railway photography by Brian Solomon