On the way toward the interchange in Palmer, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Central’s former Boston & Albany Ware River Branch follows and crosses state Route 181.
So often I have driven this way.
Catching a train here isn’t especially difficult since it runs southbound most weekday afternoons, but making a photo without any highway traffic in the way can be really challenging.
All it takes is one truck or a school bus to pull up to the crossing at the last minute and the whole scene changes, and usually not for the better!
Last Monday, May 6, 2019, was the first properly sunny day after many days of gloomy overcast weather.
In the afternoon, Paul Goewey, John Peters and I followed the Mass-Central Railroad’s line northward toward South Barre. We intercepted the southward freight. This was led by GP38 1750 with the short hood in the lead.
At Ware, it worked a short surviving segment of the old Central Massachusetts, which had run parallel to the former Boston & Albany Ware River Branch (the line that comprises most of Mass-Central’s present operation). This old line is used to reach Kanzaki Paper, one of several carload shippers in greater Ware.
I exposed these photos with FujiFilm XT1 digital cameras.
On, October 15, 2014, I was giving a tour to some visitors from France, and we passed through Ware on our way from the Quabbin Reservoir to West Brookfield’s Salem Cross Inn.
Earlier in the week, I’d noticed that Mass-Central had parked its rare Electro-Motive Division model NW5 2100 in Ware yard near the Route 9/32 overpass. So, we made a quick diversion so that I could make a photograph of the locomotive.
Mass-Central 210 rests at Ware yard on former Boston & Albany trackage on October 15, 2014. Exposed with a Canon EOS 7D with 20mm lens.
I’ve written about this before, but it was about 1981, when I rode my bicycle from Monson to Ware, specifically to photograph this locomotive, which had then just recently been delivered to Mass-Central.
When I think about all the locomotives that have come and gone in that time, I can’t help but smile. Old 2100 has nine lives, and then some! And it’s not that I need another photograph of it, but I make them anyway.
Mass-Central NW5 2100 is one of 13 such locomotives built by General Motors Electro-Motive Division between 1946 and 1947. It was originally bought by Southern Railway, but has worked Mass-Central’s Ware River Branch since the early 1980s. Exposed with a Lumix LX7 using the ‘Vivid’ color profile. Compare with the high dynamic range (HDR image below.)
My Lumix LX7 has a HDR setting that makes three images at different exposure settings in rapid succession and then combines them in-camera to create a single image with greater highlight and shadow detail than possible with a single digital exposure. Notice how this effect mutes the color and lowers contrast. Which image is better? You decide. Lumix LX7 photo.
Tracking the Light posts new material every morning.
