Tag Archives: #Rochester

The Legacy of Buffalo & Pittsburgh 207

Here’s another example of tying the threads together.

A few days ago, Wayne Duffett sent me a photo of a bridge on the Buffalo & Pittsburgh that he’d inspected some years back. In his story about the bridge (that was involved in a fire) he made mention of B&P GP9 number 207 that later was sold to the Finger Lakes Railroad, becoming its 1751.

About a dozen years ago, Conway Scenic traded a pair of second-hand GE diesels to the Finger Lakes for 1751 and has been making good use of the locomotive ever since.

While I’d become very familar with 1751 on Conway Scenic, photographing it working a great variety of trains and featuring it in magazine and billboard advertising, I wondered if I’d ever seen it before.

The other night, I was sorting through a collection of my slides that I’d separated from the main collection about 30 years ago. This was labled as “Misc Roster” and consisted of several hundred locomotive photographs organized by railroad.

Among these photos was a pair of Kodachrome 25 slides exposed on May 18, 1989 of Buffalo & Pittsburgh GP9 number 207 at Rochester & Southern’s Brooks Avenue Yard in Rochester, NY.

At the time the B&P was a relatively recent addition to the Genesee & Wyoming family, and 207 was among the few locomotives that was in B&P’s version of the G&W corporate colors. I think it was the first such B&P locomotive I’d photographed in G&W orange yellow & black paint. B&P 207 was a bit unusual in that it had come from the Chessie System, while most of B&P’s GP9s were former Norfolk & Western units.

I’d completely forgotten that I’d made this image, although once I saw it, I recall walking the tracks at Brooks Avenue one early evening to photograph the engine.

I wonder if somewhere I have a photo of this locomotive in Chessie System paint? If so, that will be a discovery for another day.

Near Hart’s Location, NH.

Brooks Avenue—Spot my Scamp!

During 1987 and 1988, I spent a fair amount of time around Rochester & Southern’s Brooks Avenue Yard.

This was a former Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh yard and located near the Rochester, NY airport, on the southwest side of the city.

On January 27, 1988, I made this black & white photo on 120 size film Tri-X using a Rolleiflex Model-T with a 645-size insert. My goal was to overexpose the film and then underprocess it to maximize tonality.

I processed it using a diluted mix of Kodak D-76. It was a good effort, but I was still learning to master this technique.

The primary subject was R&S’s recently acquired SW1200 number 107, a former Southern Pacific switcher that still featured SP’s distinctive full lighting package (including both white and red oscillating lights, visable above the cab).

Upon scanning the original negative the other day, I was delighted to see that my old Plymouth Scamp is also featured. I’d parked the car in the yard, and it is visable in the distance to the left of the switcher. That Scamp was my first car. I drove it for tens of thousands of miles in the mid-1980s making photos across New York and New England.

Tracking the Light Posts new material every day!

New York Central Transformed—Rochester, New York 1986.

On the afternoon of September 12, 1986, I exposed this photograph of a westward Conrail double-stack container train on the former New York Central Waterlevel Route passing the Amtrak Station at Rochester, New York.

The old New York Central era tower was still standing, and the station platforms, complete with the old ‘Rochester’ signs dated from the New York Central era.

In the lead was a twenty-year old former New York Central GP40, and I was just short of my twentieth birthday.

Yet, this double stack train was unlike anything ever seen on the old New York Central. Among the big changes imposed under Conrail was a clearance improvement program that allowed for much taller trains.

Exposed on Kodak black & white film. Negative cropped for presentation here.

My book Conrail and its Predecessors is available from the Kalmbach Hobby Store.

See: https://kalmbachhobbystore.com/product/book/01309

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