Announcements, photography, Rail transit marathon, Tips and Technique

Up Close with Conrail 1966

May 16, 1987 was brilliant sunny day and a great time to photograph Conrail in action.

I was working with a borrowed Canon A-1 with 50mm lens loaded with professional Kodachrome 25 (PKM) and I’d spent the morning photographing Conrail freight on the Southern Tier —what Conrail called the former Erie Route between Binghamton and Buffalo, New York.

At Hunt, New York, I caught up with a westward OIBU (Oak Island to Buffalo) and followed it west. Between Linden and Dixons on the east slope of Attica Hill this freight took the siding and stopped to wait for its eastward counterpart, Conrail’s BUOI.

While the train was stopped, I took the opportunity to make locomotive portraits.

General Electric B23-7 1966 caught my eye because its road number coincides with my birth year.

I scanned this slide using a Nikon LS-5000 scanner. After scanning I imported the TIF file into Lightroom and made a few small changes to exposure, color temperature, color balance and contrast. Below are both the unaltered file (scaled as a JPG) and the adjusted file.

The end of this month will mark 25 years since the end of Conrail as a Class-1 railroad, when its operations were divided between CSX and Norfolk Southern.

This is the un-adjusted file; although scaled for internet, threre were no changes to exposure, color or contrast in post processing.
With this version, I made a few very minor changes to exposure, color and contrast to improve the overall appearance of the image.

Tracking the Light Posts Daily!