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Up Close with an E44 Electric

My third Railroad Photography 101 Class was a success!

This was held at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania last week.

While the first part of this 3rd session was conducted outside, the last part of the class was held inside the Museum in the main hall.

Museum Director Patrick Morrison asked if we would like to explore some of the restored locomotives and cars on exhibit in the hall and offered to open up a few of the museum’s gems for photography.

This was a wonderful idea, and soon the students and I were climbing in and around the exhibits.

I had never before been on a Pennsylvania Railroad E44 electric, so it was a thrill for me to take a look inside and sit in the engineer’s seat. These boxy high-horsepower electrics were built by General Electric and share a resemblence with GE’s diesel-electrics built around the same time.

My photos for this exercise were exposed using a Nikon Z7-II with a 24-70mm Nikkor Z-series zoom lens.

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A Lousy Slide from a Hazy Day at Enola.

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Kodachrome 64 color slide exposed in 1981 scanned and adjusted in 2019.


In August 1981, my family and I set off to Pennsylvania in our 1969 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser.

Among our holiday adventures was arriving at Enola on a sweltering hot afternoon.

The consensus was to find a place to stay. I wanted to see the famous railroad yard. The solution proved to be a motel called the ‘Summerdale Junction Inn’ (or something like that) which overlooked Conrail’s sprawling former Pennsylvania Railroad yards.

We requested a room trackside.

While the rest of the family relaxed by the pool, I attempted to make photos from the motel window using my father’s Leica M3 fitted to a Visoflex with 200mm Telyt.

At the time I was delighted to see so many locomotives, including a great many former PRR E44 electrics which had been recently stored owning to Conrail’s decision to discontinue its electric freight operations (long complicated story that will be addressed in my upcoming Conrail book).

This isn’t a great photo. There’s too many wires, too many bushes and the hazy light was less than ideal.

Glad I have it though. I may consider it for the book. Unless youhave a better view of all the stored electrics!

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