July 20, 1986 was the last full day of traditional directional double track operations (rule 251) on Conrail’s Boston Line between Palmer (future CP83) and Springfield (future CP92).

Using my father’s Rolleiflex Model T, I made this photo of Amtrak F40PH 201 leading an Inland Corridor train east at milepost 84 (in the town of Monson, Massachusetts). The next day, Conrail crews cut in the new crossovers which took the old westward track at this location out of service. It was ripped up some months later.

In 2011, I scanned this 645 size black & white negative. Unfortunately, I forgot to reverse the scan and so it remained as a negative image.

There is probably some ‘one-click’ means reversing the scan into a positive image using Lightroom. I had no luck finding that trick, so Kris and I ‘Googled’ how to accomplish this simple task.

Basically, you open the ‘three bars’ control at top left, expand the ‘light’ controls and scroll down to the ‘D log H’ curve (it’s the graph that plot the exposure curve), and reverse the orientation of the line graph so that it goes from bottom left to top right (rather than the other way around.)

This created a positive, from which I made my corrections, albeit in reverse.

I’ve included the work windows.

Tracking the Light Posts Daily!