Tag Archives: #NYS&W

New NYS&W DASH-8s

Thirty-five years ago today, I exposed this Kodachrome 25 slide of nearly new New York, Susquehanna & Western DASH8-40Bs in Buffalo, New York.

On May 21, 1989, NYS&W 4038 was leading an eastward double-stack train that had paused at William Street for a crew change. This was during the period when NYS&W was the designated operator of the Delaware & Hudson and had acquired two orders of new GE DASH8-40Bs built to Conrail specs to alleviate a motive power shortage.

Engine 4038 was just a few weeks out of the factory at Erie.

As with many of my Kodachrome 25 slides from this period, the image suffers from a cyan bias. Cyan is a blue-green color that is the opposite of red in common photographic reproduction processes.

After making a hi-res TIF scan, I imported the slide into Lightroom and made a series of minor adjustments to minimize the effects of the cyan bias and high contrast. I added majenta and yellow, while resetting the black point, lightening shadows, and reducing the highlight density. I made these corrections with aid of the Lightroom histogram.

Below are both the scaled but unmodified scan, and my adjusted version.

Unmodified scan of K25 slide. Original exposed with a Leica M2 with 35mm Summicron.
Modified scan.

Tracking the Lights Posts Daily!

NYS&W 4034 = Pan Am Railways 5946

On Friday, Kris and I stopped by East Deerfield Yard near Greenfield, Mass., where we found a pair of Pan Am Railways’ General Electric DASH8-40Bs (B40-8) switching.

McClelland Farm Road at East Deerfield-the ‘New’ bridge, completed in 2018. Lumix LX7 photo.
Lumix LX7 photo of Pan Am Railways 5946 at East Deerfield, Massachusetts.

Lumix LX7 photo of Pan Am Railways 5946 at East Deerfield, Massachusetts.

The trailing locomotive was Pan Am 5946, a former CSX unit, and originally New York, Susquehanna & Western number 4034.

I figured I had a photo of this engine in my files, since I photographed many of NYS&W’s GE’s at the time of delivery back in 1988 and 1989.

I found the photo I was seeking. NYS&W 4034 was paired with a Norfolk Southern unit at SK Yard in Buffalo on May 4, 1989, shortly after it was built by General Electric.

Kodachrome 25 slide exposed with a Leica M2 with 90mm f2.8 Elmarit.

Tracking the Light Posts Daily!

Cortland, NY June 11, 2005

I was working on a book on Electro-Motive Division early General Purpose diesels. Specifically the GP7s, GP9s, GP18s and GP20s.

I needed photos of GP18s to illustrate the book, and at the time New York Susquehanna & Western was still regularly operating their small fleet of three GP18s, which the railroad had bought new from EMD.

So, photographer Pat Yough and I drove to central New York state and sought out these vintage locomotives.

I made these Fujichrome color slides at Cortland, NY, where the NYS&W operated a portion of the old Lackawanna.

Last night I scanned the slides, then processed the images in Adobe Photoshop to correct for color, adjust highlight and shadow areas and make other minor adjustments to contrast etc. Below I display both the uncorrected and corrected scans to show the differences between them.

Uncorrected scan.
Uncorrected scan.
Corrected scan. Version 1
Corrected scan. Version 2
Corrected scan. Version 1

Outside my window it is snowing, so looking at photos made on a bright Spring morning is a refreshing change of scene!

Tracking the Light Posts Daily!