Pennsylvania

It's obvious from the Fall colors that I shot this in the Fall of 1995, this being part of a larger National Railway Historical Society bus trip to various heritage rail sites in Southern New York and Central Pennsylvania. It is indeed ironic that the NRHS has to travel by bus most of the time, but that's life in a country with a substandard rail system. In the case of the Stourbridge Line, though, that's part of the appeal, of course, as they have this old and super-rare EMD BL2 diesel on their roster, which was the centerpoint of the trip. We rode it all the way over the line from Stourbridge to Lackawaxen (if memory serves), and this was at, I think the Stourbridge stop, or some other place. I do remember that this is where we got on, I'm pretty sure. Any info on this would be welcome, as this trip was 12 years ago, and I don't have my notes nearby. I hope you like the photo, anyway. :-)

I apologize if this isn't Wilkes Barre, or if this isn't a factory. :-) I couldn't figure out if it was a factory, power plant, or mine, but it clearly has some conveyor belts on it. Any info on this would be very welcome. In any event, it appears to be abandoned, as a close inspection of this photo will show that the windows are broken.

A day ago, I had absolutely no plans on posting this...ever. At least, I had no plans to post the original 1994 scan from my Omniscan, but the events of the past hour, with one of my Omniscans getting 18 views, has changed my mind. I've always liked this shot, and I've long had the intention of rescanning it, maybe in color, maybe not, but not like this!!! Maybe sometime when I have it handy. In the meantime, this is faster. :-)

This one isn't even on my website. :-) It's a firearms view of the drivers, which I have changed my mind about since getting such an immense response to my rail-related black and whites.

There's the Baldwin builder plate, although in general the photo is interesting, I think.

This is the turbogenerator, as #90 is new enough to have an electrical system, at least for lighting, anyway.

Railroad photographers often like photographing the valve gear, in this case Walschaerts, if I'm not mistaken (please correct me if I'm getting this wrong!!!).

Here's another one, as it started to move!!

Some days you just get lucky. The weather is perfect, the light is perfect, your camera performs flawlessly, you're in all the right places at the right times, and you have a phenomenal subject. Actually, Strasburg #90, while beautiful, isn't the most spectacular steam locomotive you could ever find. It's just a Baldwin Standard Decapod 2-10-0 from the 1920s that was designed for hauling freight on branchlines, but it's big and bulky enough to give the impression of massive, overwhelming force. On this particular day, I wasn't in Strasburg to take photographs, but to do documentary research, but I got very lucky coming out of the Pennsylvania State Railroad Museum in that #90 was there exactly when I was, and it was a blazing hot summer day. You can see the brightness of the sun in the pictures, and although the originals are fine, the scans look more bleached. It's the only shame in displaying them here, as my old Omniscan came nowhere close to doing the photos justice.

This was taken in 1994 on the former Pennsylvania Railroad mainline (then Conrail) on the famous Horseshoe Curve near Altoona. Amtrak still operated the Broadway Limited between New York and Chicago, and this was it, headed by two EMD F40PHs, both now retired. The Broadway Limited has, for now, been replaced by the Manhattan Limited in Amtrak's timetable, and now all the power for the Philadelphia-Chicago (or at least Harrisburg-Chicago) leg is provided by G.E. Genesis P42s. This has always been one of my favorite "train" shots, even if it isn't great by the standards of orthodox photography, with no abstraction, merely average colors, too-perfect light, and nothing of interest to the non-railfan.

This was our train pulling into the station at Orbisonia. The trams in the background are part of the Rockhill Trolley Museum. The odd thing is that, technically, Orbisonia Station is actually located in Rockhill Furnace, while the Rockhill Trolley Museum is technically located in Orbisonia, so the names sort of don't make any sense.

This was during the runaround, and originally I scanned this in black and white, partly because I only had my Omniscan then, but also because I thought it looked better. It's in color now, though, and I don't regret the change.

This was taken in the EBT's main locomotive shop in Orbisonia, PA, on the same 1994 NRHS tour as my other EBT photos.

This is part of the same series as Strasburg #90, Picture 3 (go figure :-)). This one, though, may have the most well-rounded artistic merit of the series, as it has abstraction, the best contrast, the best detail, and so on.

This is a photo that I took of Strasburg #90, a Baldwin Standard Decapod 2-10-0, during the summer of 1997. It was one of a series that I still regard among my best black and white photos ever taken of a steam locomotive. This is my favorite one because it shows off the details the best of the series, in my opinion, and it is a little bit more abstract than the others, even if it's still clearly a steam locomotive smokebox. I used a Nikon N6006 with a Nikkor 35-50 zoom and Kodak Tri-X 400 film. I had just learned to shoot proper black and white in the semester or two before I shot this, and this was my first real success with black and white rail photography, so that also adds to the significance of this. Hopefully sometime in the future I'll get around to posting the others.

This shot, of former Milwaukee Road #261, was actually a photo runby, with two encores! There's nothing quite like a 4-8-4 being gunned. :-) The excursion was the finale for the 1995 NRHS National Convention.

I took this right after our NRHS Convention Special pulled into Steamtown for its grand reopening in 1995, which coincided, of course, with the NRHS Convention. We had ALCO diesels on the way in, of course, but Milwaukee Road 261 on the way out!!

Here's another shot from the Steamtown Grand Reopening in 1995, showing two of Steamtown's three active on-site steam locomotives of the time, 2317 and 3254.