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The Elusive 915

This past Saturday, I gave a 45 minute talk on the Development and Application of the American Steam Locomotive to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.

Among the attendees was SUNY-Buffalo Associate Professor David Alff, who presented later in the evening. His topic was on his most recent publication, the Northeast Corridor. He offered a fascinating social history, not just of the modern day railroad, but of more than two centuries of transportation.

Earlier in the day David and I shared a table signing our respective books and I was telling him of my days watching trains from my grandparents terrace in Co-op City overlooking the Northeast Corridor in The Bronx.(New York City).

Here I am signing a book on Saturday. Photo by Kris Solomon

Sitting out in front of the museum is Amtrak AEM-7 915, a locomotive that spent roughly 35 years hauling trains on the Northeast Corridor. I have more photos of this classic electric at Strasburg than I do of it under wire.

Over the last few months, I’ve scoured thousands of my own photos, looking for the most representative and evocative images of Amtrak locomotives and trains for my latest book ‘Amtrak Equipment’ (that I’m now in the final stages of completing). In this process, I was frustrated in locating decent images of old 915 at work. (Although, I found a few of its from years ago, and some of those have appeared on Tracking the Light.)

Last night, I was reviewing some black & white negatives from the 1980s that I’d scanned back in 2016, and I found a sequence of telephoto views that I made with my father’s Leica M3 from my grandparents’ terrace.

I had been making photos here since the mid-1970s, but many suffered from inexperience and ineffective technique. By the summer of 1985, I had perfected my black & white photo technique to the point where I finally able to make some satisfying images of trains from this family vantage point.

In the black & white view below of Amtrak 915 crossing the Pelham River, I was using a Leitz Wetzlar f4 135mm Elmar lens, which was a remarkable sharp piece of glass.

Finding this photo was a Eureka! moment.

915 now rests in front of the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania at Strasburg.
Amtrak 915 in August 1985 leading a train toward Penn Station, as viewed from apartment 19E, Co-op City, The Bronx, NY.

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Mansfield—Then and Now—Two Photos, 34 years.

My recent visit to Mansfield, Massachusetts led me to recall visits there back in the mid-1980s.

Thursday evening, I started digging through my negative6s from 1985-1988, of which there are thousands.

I ritually worked with a Rollei Model T, exposing 120 size B&W roll film with a ‘Super Slide’ adapter that gave me 16 645-size negatives per individual roll.

On August 19, 1986, photographer Bob Karambelas and I visited Mansfield on a whirlwind rainy day tour of south eastern Massachusetts.

This was more than a decade before the North East Corridor was electrified, and a dozen years prior to the demise of Conrail.

I’ve included a digital photo from my earlier post ‘Purple Trains’ and a single frame from a roll of Kodak Tri-X exposed on that day. I processed the Tri-X in Kodak D76.

Mansfield, Massachusetts on August 19, 1986.
Almost the exact same location in November 2020.

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