A recent discussion with friends about bridges and tunnels in the Lehigh Gorge led me to mention some photos I made at Glen Onoko, near Jim Thorpe, Pa., in 2007.
On a humid August morning, I followed a trail and climbed a hill overlooking twin bridges over the Lehigh River. One bridge carried the former Lehigh Valley main line, now used by Norfolk Southern and Reading & Northern; the other was the parallel former Central Railroad of New Jersey route. This was part of a twentieth-century line relocation that replaced the CNJ’s earlier alignment, which passed through the “Turn Hole” Tunnel beneath the ridge on which I was standing. The CNJ’s modern route was consolidated with the Lehigh Valley’s, and the extant former CNJ bridge was later converted for use as a road/trail.
Our continuing discussion about these alignments led to the question, “So, where’s the picture?” To which I replied, “What? Now I need to scour my collection looking for a train photo? Arrgh!”
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been labeling, organizing, and filing my slide collection—and this was a test of that effort. I went to the binder for “R” shortlines, flipped to the section on Reading & Northern, and located two of the photos from that August morning nearly 20 years ago. I scanned them using my Nikon LS-5000 scanner and scaled the images for internet presentation.
Why scale the scans? When I go through the effort of locating a slide and setting up the scanner, I always make the highest-resolution scan possible with my equipment—typically a TIFF file at 4,000 dpi. Since the resulting file is about 150 MB—far too large to send via email and too big for presentation here on Tracking the Light—I then import the TIFF into Lightroom and scale it to a more appropriate size.
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