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.

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