Recently, my girlfriend Kris Sabbatino and I decided to build a model railroad.

For a prototype we selected eastern Pennsylvania anthracite country.

I began scouring my archives looking for material.

Part of my inspiration for this model railroad began many years ago when I was looking through my father’s photographs of Reading Company’s Iron Horse Rambles that he exposed over a five-year period beginning in 1959. Many of these photos were made from the excursions or on chases through eastern Pennsylvania. Most were not captioned at the time of processing, which often makes location details elusive but also part of the dreamlike mystery of building the scale railroad.

In 2007, I assembled a book titled the Railroads of Pennsylvania, and made a detailed study of the region.

In 2014 and 2015, I was researching on books on steam locomotives and made several trips with Pat Yough to photograph the Reading & Northern.

The model railroad will blend together all of this inspiration and much more.

As part of a new on-going feature on Tracking the Light, I’ll be reporting on progress with this model railroad and the source material from which we draw.

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