I’ve previously posted to Tracking the Light some of my favorite photos exposed on this day on the former Pennsylvania Railroad at Bennington Curve.
In this view, exposed in the early morning light, a set of GP40s lead an uphill train. The roar of the 16-645E3 diesels was intense and it made for memorable drama.
Conrail was really busy railroad in those days. In addition to parades of eastbound and westbound freights, there were light helper moves and a few Amtrak trains.
In 1987 my choice film was Kodak T-Max 400, then a relative new emulsion. After more a year of work with T-max, I returned to using older emulsions such as Kodak Tri-X, which I felt produced better results. However, modern scanning techniques have allowed for pleasing interpretations of this almost 40 year-old negative.
In the late 1980s Kodak introduced its new T-grain T-Max black & white emulsions.
I quickly adopted these new films in place of Kodak Tri-X and Kodak Plus-X.
After about a year of trial and error with the T-Max films, I opted to return to the more traditional non-T-grain emulsions. In the mean time I committed countless unrepeatable scenes to T-Max.
This photo features a freshly-painted (and only recently acquired) Guilford SD45 eastbound at Greenfield, Massachusetts. I exposed it on 120-size TMY (T-Max 400) film using my father’s Rollieflex Model-T.
Part of the difficulty was that I insisted on developing the film in straight Kodak D76 instead of the recommended T-Max developer. I did this to save money; when I was at RIT in Rochester (actually Henrietta), New York, photo students received basic photo chemistry as part of their lab fee, which meant I could get all the D76 I wanted without any additional cost, while T-Max developer had to be purchased.
What I saved in developer, I’ve paid 100-fold in laborious print making and difficult scanning.
However, using Adobe Lightroom I’ve finally been able to get decent tonality out of these 34 year-old photos.
Springfield Terminal SD45 679 leads an eastward road freight at Greenfield, Massachusetts on December 19, 1987.
The SD45 has always been a favorite locomotive, and at the time I was quite pleased to catch Guilford’s latest motive power in fresh paint.
