Forgotten Photos

Monongahela Railway; Time, Pennsylvania; October 1990

I've been slowly working through my slide collection making scans of just about everything. I'll take a stack of slides, load them into the scanner stack loader, make the scans, and then import them into Lightroom. Since I'm not really looking at the slides I'm going to scan as I load them in the scanner, when they open in Lightroom it's like the good old days of opening a fresh box of slides to see what's in them. I'm often surprised at what comes out of the scanner!

Such was the case when I loaded up the slides from October 1990. When the images opened in Lightroom I found a trip that I had taken to the Monongahela Railway back when that was the place to go for photography. The weather was bad for part of the trip, and to compound matters I managed to blow the exposures on some of the best scenes from the trip. Thus, the slides sat unlooked at and unappreciated for 20 years. But with Photoshop and Lightroom, slides that were rendered useless can yield very nice images. My favorite from the trip was of a pair of Detroit Edison GE diesels leading a train at Time, Pennsylvania. I had over-exposed the original, but thanks to modern technology I've managed to save this photo (above).

The rain made for some dark photography on the first day, but some brightening in Photoshop put the Monongahela's "Super 7" GE diesels back into good light, such as this scene of a train heading out of Waynesburg.

Monongahela Railway; Waynesburg, Pennsylvania; October 1990

There were a few other gems located in the October 1990 stack. The town of Nicholson, Pennsylvania, had a large event, complete with a parade, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western's magnificent bridge over Tunkhannock Creek and the town. That night the bridge was illuminated by a searchlight truck. The black & white photos I took that evening were pretty good (one appeared in the NRHS Bulletin), but I was never happy with the color slides. But thanks to scanning technology, the color version is now usable.

Nicholson Viaduct; October 1990

There was still more hidden gems in that stack of slides. A bunch of us did an informal night photo session at the shops of the New York, Susquehanna & Western in Little Ferry, New Jersey. One of the scenes from that evening is among my all-time favorites, but there was a second scene I had almost forgotten about. There was a front-end loader parked near GP18 No. 1800, and four of us carefully stacked ourselves, cameras and tripods onto the hood of the loader to get a nice scene of the 1800 with another locomotive tucked away in the shop.

New York, Susquehanna & Western; Little Ferry, New Jersey; October 1990

And finally, it's been my goal recently to get the Stourbridge Line's BL2 diesel passing the PP&L power house in Hawley, Pennsylvania. I knew I had shot a fan trip there many years ago, but forgot exactly when. Well, guess what showed up in this stack of slides. Yup, the trip was just over 20 years ago, in October 1990. It's great to go down memory lane with a stack of old slides made new through modern technology!

Stourbridge Line; Hawley, Pennsylvania; October 1990