In scanning my vintage Kodachrome slides, I found two color views at Rices near Charlemont, Massachusetts that I exposed nearly 15 years apart.
The top view was made looking east from a Mystic Valley Railroad Society excursion to the Hoosac Tunnel in May 1982. We had just over taken a short Boston & Maine local freight heading for North Adams. Interestingly this was my first photo at Rices.
The second photo was made of an empty coal train following a late-season heavy snow in April 1997.
Exposed on Kodachrome 64 using a Leica 3A with 50mm Summitar in May 1982.Kodachrome 25 exposed with a Nikon F3T fitted with an 80-200mm Nikkor Zoom lens. April 2, 1997.
In July 1984, I was only a few weeks out of High School. My Pal TSH and I were on one of our photography adventures. Bob Buck of Tucker’s Hobbies in Warren, Massachusetts had alerted us to the fact that Amtrak’s southward Montrealer had suffered a locomotive failure, and had been brought down by a borrowed Canadian National M-420.
At that time seeing a Canadian National locomotive in Springfield was an event, and the M-420s were a rare catch. Over the coming years CN M-420s would become increasingly common on the Central Vermont, but that was in the future and at this time I was very keen to catch this rare bird in home territory.
I made this photo of the foreigner on track 2A at the east end of Springfield Union Station (Massachusetts) along side a row of Amtrak /CDOT Budd-built SPV2000s that were assigned to work the Springfield-Hartford-New Haven shuttle service in the early/mid 1980s. The SPVs would only survive on this run for another couple of years and were relative rare machines.
