In mid-November , this was the view looking west from our room at Gallitzin’s Tunnel Inn located adjacent to Norfolk Southern’s former Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line near the tunnels under the Allegheny Divide.
I made this photo with my Nikon Z6 with f4.0 24-70mm zoom lens.
Kris & I spent two days and two nights at this excellent railroad themed bed & breakfast while exploring the old Main Line & environs.
I was impressed that some of my titles were on the shelf!
Among the features of staying at the Tunnel Inn in Gallitzin, Pennsylvania is the porch at the back of the building that over looks the Main Line.
This is equipped with lights designed to illuminate the railroad to aid in the views of passing freights.
On our second evening at the Tunnel Inn back in mid-November (2021), I exposed this sequence of eastward Norfolk Southern freight 36A (Conway Yard to Edgemore, Delaware).
This was an enormous freight. In addition to head-end power, there were both mid-train and tail-end distributed power units (remote control diesels).
Last month Kris and I booked two nights at the Tunnel Inn in Gallitzin, PA, located at milepost 248, immediately west of the tunnels below the Allegheny Divide at the summit of the old Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line.
I love Pennsylvania.
I’d made my first visit to Gallitzin on a family holiday back in the summer of 1981—40 years ago. There was no Tunnel Inn back then.
In the 1980s, my old pal TSH and I would make photos from the bridge over the line adjacent to the building that would later become the Tunnel Inn.
On arrival last month, Bob, the proprietor of the Tunnel Inn offered Kris and me a room overlooking the tracks named for the old Pennsylvania Railroad MO Tower. (The tower had controlled movements through the interlocking at Cresson, several miles to the west of Gallitzin.)
The Inn is nicely furnished and decorated inside, and there’s a nice tavern just a short walk down the road. Across the tracks is a preserved Pennsylvania Railroad N8 caboose.
Minutes after we checked in to the Tunnel Inn, the first of many Norfolk Southern trains rolled by.
When I was at the Rochester Institute of Technology, one of my professors discussed the ‘Ratio of Success’, which defined how many photos you typically took in order to get a really good one.
By one standard this averaged about one per roll of film. Or a ratio of 1 to 36.
For the last three days on Tracking the Light, I’ve been displaying photos from a single roll of Kodak Plus X exposed on Conrail’s former Pennsylvania Railroad lines back in the summer of 1989.
I wouldn’t want to bore everyone by displaying all 36 frames, but lets just say, on this day I was having a better than average ratio of success!
Exposed with a Leice on Kodak Plus-X in summer 1989.
This one portrays a Conrail unit grain train descending ‘The Slide’ east of the tunnels at Gallitzin, Pennsylvania.
