Upstate New York (location required)
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Docked a few feet away from the N.Y. state thruway the Mohawk river and Erie Canal run together and then split under the Mohawk Bridge
This was an amazing sky to start with. The unintended effect, however, was courtesy of my car's polarized windshield. Not entirely sharp, as it was shot from a moving vehicle.
Explore April 17, 2009 (highest position #90)
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Bridges are one of my favorite subjects. They offer such a great variety of perspectives and angles. When combined with the varying atmospheric conditions the photographic opportunities are endless. Despite having been to the foot of the South Grand Island Bridge many times I don't feel like I will run out of material any time soon, if ever ... #etbtsy
A trio of BNSF GE's lead loaded CSX oil train K138 as it rolls east over the New York State Thruway in Batavia, New York with a BNSF lettered warbonnet in the lead. The train was interchanged from BNSF in Cicero and is bound for refineries on Philadelphia's east side for processing.
====Info====
CSX Rochester Sub
Batavia, NY
CSX K138 (Oil Loads; Cicero, IL to Philadelphia East Side, PA)
BNSF 736 C44-9W Blt. 1997
BNSF 6983 ES44C4 Blt. 2012
BNSF 3901 ET44C4 Blt. 2015
CP Rail SD40-2-5429, Norfolk Southern C30-7-8063 & CP Rail SD40-2-5677 are on track one, at the west end of CSX's Philly Sub, with W/B train Q-403-01. The Baltimore Harbor Tunnel Thruway (I-895) and a catenary pole on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor can be seen in the right distance.
NBSR GP31ECO-M 4307 with its Slug Mate GP-CBU 405 trailing on the NBSR-CN Transfer Job as it passes by the Saint John Thruway and under the Main St. Overpass.
A trio of Richmond Fredericksburg and Potomac EMDs and a former Seaboard System B36-7 roll CSX R191 underneath the Harbor Tunnel Thruway overpass in Elkridge and roll south on the former B&O Capitol Subdivision in 1991.
A light dusting of snow was covering the Maryland countryside and by the next day, this train would be nice and warm in god's waiting room.
Ramapo is a hamlet between Suffern and Sloatsburg, NY. A factory town. Thruway construction demolished much of the town. It still has a few buildings and many empty houses vacated in recent years. Few people live on the edges of the hamlet, The factory is still in use, but the bulk of the area is abandoned.
This is the factory end of the bridge over the Ramapo River.
S/B freight AW5 is leaving Conrail's Bayview Yard with GG1-4853 added to the head end as a tunnel helper. In addition to GP40-3248, the engine consist has two "U Boats" U25B-2632 & U33B-2952 providing the power. At this time, it was very rare to see GE units in Baltimore. Overhead is I-895, the Harbor Tunnel Thruway.
Some train tracks in Upstate New York, seen from the thruway last Thanksgiving weekend.
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CSX CW44-9-9013 is coming out of CSX's Bay View Yard with W/B "Bare Table" train X-301-08. The I-895 Harbor Tunnel Thruway overpass is in the distance along with the T catenary poles on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.
Village of Perry, NY
Rural, centrally located village is 3 miles from the Perry Entrance to Letchworth State Park and 1 mile from Silver Lake. It is about a 30 minute drive South of the NYS Thruway at Batavia (Rt. 246), between Rochester & Buffalo and adjacent to the Finger Lakes region.
Ann Burlingham, owner of Burlingham Books, Perry, N.Y., is stepping away from the business after 12 years and will turn the reins over to manager Giuseppe Gentile, who has worked at the store for a decade. Plans call for the bookstore to reopen with a new name in June.
Gentile told the Daily News that he plans to carry on many traditions, but when the name changes and the new store opens, likely in June, people can expect to see some changes: "I want to expand the cafe, we're going to have a larger seating area for cafe patrons, faster wi-fi. We're going to keep a lot of the same lines--all of the books are going to stay--but I also want to carry Legos, board games, stuff like that."
CP Rail MLW M630 4561 was showing off its profile in CSX's Curtis Bay yard in the shadow of the I-895 Harbor Tunnel Thruway steel overpass in Baltimore in 1992.
It had just arrived from Canada with an acid train and would call Charm City home for a few days while the train was being unloaded at a nearby chemical plant.
The Tappan Zee Bridge, officially named the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge after former New York Governor Mario Cuomo.
Y202 spots a healthy cut of box cars loaded with rolled paper inside the Bestway Distribution warehouse off of the A Industrial in Cheektowaga, NY.
One of two second shift industry switchers out of CSX's Frontier Yard, Y202 is the only job left in Buffalo which still consistently uses a shoving platform, specifically an old Conrail blue caboose of which there are still a handful of floating around our area. Shortline Depew Lancaster & Western also uses one some days, but they're a lot more obscure to shoot. This job meanwhile has a small list of customers to handle during the week. On Mon/Wed/Fri they serve Nabisco, now known as Milkbone, on the Belt Line just north of the west end of Frontier, and then usually shove out to the A Industrial, which once boasted a myriad of customer spurs, but now only Bestway remains. The A also used to connect to the former West Shore line at its northernmost point, forming a wye in fact back in the days of the NYC, once part of the Gardenville Line through WNY. The only thing pre-empting a trip onto the A Industrial at this time aside from Nabisco is the longer shove out to 84 Lumber a couple miles east, accessed in the old Depew Yard, which aside from a second spur to Scranton Thruway Builder Supply and a team track, isn't really much of a yard. On Tu/Th Y202 handles switching of Transflo Services at what CSX refers to as Stock Yard around here, directly across from Buffalo Central Terminal. Up until early 2023, Metalico Buffalo was handled by Y233, but ever since has been split between them and Y202, leaning slightly more towards the latter unless they have an especially heavy night of switching in the flat maze that is Stock Yard.
My first time shooting Bestway was way back in my most explorative year around the Buffalo-Niagara region being 2022. While normally my OCD map exploration helps me sniff out every possible spur a job might serve, this one had slipped under the radar for me back in 2022. Throughout late spring into early summer that year, two of my main focuses were on nabbing daylight shots of Y202 serving both 84 Lumber and the other customer which called the A Industrial home for a long time, being Sonwil. Often times my attempts at daylight for either customer were thwarted by the job getting out of Frontier too late, being on at 1600, taking too long to switch Nabisco, or getting stuck behind other traffic waiting to shove down track four either to 84 or the A. The day I finally got 84 in daylight properly was a day when the crew shoved straight east out of the yard without a switch at Nabisco first. This may have also been the case my first time shooting Sonwil in daylight a couple weeks earlier on Memorial Day. Caught up in the excitement of finally documenting something I was told would be nearly impossible, I had overlooked Bestway as a potential stop for this job. After pulling west from 84 Lumber and clearing CP 431, the crew shoved straight north to the current end of the industrial to Sonwil. I recall noticing an amount of box cars far greater than what Sonwil could fit, but thought maybe they would end up leaving them off spot nearby.
As daylight faded that day I drove away and sat nearby enjoying a victory ice cream from local favorite Frosty's Ice Cream. A friend of mine was a conductor trainee at the time, fittingly also on the job that day. I continued to listen to the radio while consuming my ice cream, hearing switching maneuvers still being called out. At first I thought maybe my friend had messed up what cars they were supposed to spot with all the cars in their consist. A silly first thought, but not uncommon for trainees to make a goof. I feel bad for underestimating him in that fashion, and came to find that my suspicions were unfounded. Taking a look at Google Maps, I found yet another spur possible to see being switched, a quick drive across the street from Frosty's in fact. With the warehouse located inside a massive business park, I was skeptical at how close I'd be able to get. As it turns out, Bestway is one of the easiest things to access in town as the massive gates tied to the fence line are always open to vehicle traffic. I found my way straight back to where the spur crosses over the network of driveways surrounding these businesses. Several other spurs are still extant in this area, formerly catering to a couple other businesses, but unfortunately the switch towards these is spiked for Bestway, the fence gates at the top of hill where the spur branches off forever tossed in the weeds. The warehouse next door to Bestway, which has two tracks leading into it, has clearly been modified to add a more permanent wall where either an open space or gargantuan garage door once stood. The outline of whatever was or wasn't there previously allowing railcars to pass that point is still very evident.
The door into Bestway strangely had yet to be opened, so my educated guess is these guys were doing some reconfiguring of their train up top before descending down the hill to switch here as I managed to catch most of what transpired. It was twilight mode in the sky at that point, the last inklings of daylight settling for slumber on the horizon, giving way to an orange/red/purple/blue fade behind the scene. Thus, my first time shooting here would be in almost darkness. I worked with what I had for nighttime skills at the time, limited in my experience to only the last half year about. In the four years since my timely discovery of this place, it's been a mainstay for me, usually garnering a few visits a year from me still as I'm always willing to try new angles. The sun sets directly behind the warehouse so if Y202 makes it here any earlier than the last 30 minutes of daylight, backlighting will be a factor. Even with a new on duty time of 1430 as of earlier this year, it still seems the crew will make it here on the brink of sunset a lot of evenings. While I seem to have more shots here after sunset than not, I'm willing to work with what I'm given as there is sufficient ambient light both outside, and as displayed here, inside too.
Though the story above pertains to my very first attempt at shooting here in 2022, the shot being shown is a 2025 product. It helps to know the crews, as you might be thinking this is a little ballsy for a shot. And to that I agree, but it's not often the engine makes it this far inside as half the time cars will be spotted with the power still sticking half out of the building. The engineer Kevin strangely left the cab and took a walk down the dock to go talk with his conductor, leaving no one around as I took advantage of the moment. Even with Kevin in the cab I probably still would have gone to this length. It's kind of crazy when you consider three of those rolls of paper are almost as tall as 2727, an engine I am no stranger to shooting shoving into warehouses like this. Suffice to say, this stood up as one of my absolute favorite shots to come away with in the calendar year of 2025. This was certainly not the first time I had pushed the envelope of trying to shoot inside the warehouse, but usually just doing so at the edge of the garage door line behind me. But when an opportunity presents itself, you don't think twice and move on it as fast as you can. Bestway continues to receive cars in batches, some days only one, and some days up to ten. They are at the this time the only customer left keeping the A Industrial alive, barring whichever tenant who recently took over the rail-served side of Sonwil decides to take it up with CSX. No one's holding their breath waiting on that to happen, but as long as the rails are in ground the possibility always remains! Till then, I'll still be shooting Bestway in every new way my mind can concoct.
Fukmer Creek enters the Moawk River/Erie Canal with the N.Y. State Thruway on the north side looking east towards Herkimer.
CSXT local L022 has 44 empty grain hoppers headed for Selkirk behind CSXT 8854 and 8128 (SD40-2s blt. Aug. 1978 as Conrail 6496 and Aug. 1980 as Clinchfield 8128 respectively) as they sail over the Hudson River at about MP QG 9 on Main Track 3 of modern day CSXT's Castleton Subdivision headed home to the big Selkirk Yard.
They are emerging from the 598.6 main span of the massive Alfred H. Smith Bridge which in total is 5255 ft long and 139 feet above the Hudson River below. In 1921 a contract for the main grading and drainage work and for all the actual bridge construction except its steel superstructure was awarded to Walsh Construction Company, a well-established Iowa-based railroad builder that would later go on (in 22 joint venture with others) to build the Grand Coulee Dam and, still later, to achieve national prominence as a builder of urban skyscrapers. The 23,000 tons of structural steel required for the bridge would be fabricated in Pittsburgh and erected by Bethlehem Steel's McClintic Marshall subsid- iary under a direct contract with the railroad. Physical work began in early 1922 and two years later on November 20, 1924 the first train crossed the bridge. It was named in honor of Alfred Holland Smith, the president of the New York Central Railroad who authorized the construction of this bridge as part of an extensive project known as the Castleton Cut-Off. He died in a horse-riding accident in Central Park in 1924, only a few months before completion of the bridge. He is sometimes confused with Alfred E. Smith, New York's governor at the time who was aboard that first train and christened the structure in honor of the other fallen Mr. Smith.
This bridge is now the southernmost place a train can cross the Hudson River (excepting NYNJ's barge service) and is used by all CSXT traffic heading into New England via the old B&A as well as any traffic direct to New York City via the historic NYC Main, now Amtrak and Metro North's Hudson Line and on a typical day 18 to 20 trains will cross. The parallel structure beyond is Castleton-on-Hudson bridge opened in 1959 to carry the New York State Thruway's Berkshire extension connection to the Massachusetts Turnpike.
Coeymans, New York
Friday Friday November, 2024
It's November of 1997. I'm a freshman in high school and have a job bagging groceries at the Thruway Supermarket in Walden. The magazine rack there was representative of railfan media at the time, carrying the full slate of Carstens and Kalmbach. So, if I wanted to psychoanalyze things I could say that the Grafton & Upton article from the November 1997 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman stuck in my head because of a church steeple shot in it as I really over time have a thing for cool buildings and gnarly trees in photos. It could also have been because it wasn't written in a "how to model this" tone entirely but included a little bit of the history and operation. It also stuck in my head that the railroad essentially went a short way from the B&A interchange to their lone customer. Fast forward just a shade under 9 years and of the 2 trains I was ever on east of Worcester I was kinda most concerned with seeing the G&U interchange and wasn't really surprised to just see a switch and a track trailing off into the woods (it's my memory, it looks how it looks in my memory).
A decade or so later I'm out in the world and seeing that the Grafton & Upton has been reborn and has an F Unit. My trips east in this time frame are most concerned with Guilford in Maine (Thanks George & Candy) and at that point I didn't really have the network yet to know a person who knows a person who knows what's going on everywhere. February 28th of 2018 I hand a cold Coors Light to Dave Blazejewski at Norden on Donner Pass. He thought we were enemies because of internet shit but he didn't really know me yet.
2020 I get furloughed at CN and decide (it didn't take much deliberation) to do a 7 week road trip through peak covid (china virus released from the wuhan institute of virology which is curiously funded by US sources) and race riots focusing especially on the Reading & Northern. I had time to do everything but my focus was single minded. Early in June I was sick of sleeping in my truck so much and went home to Minnesota. I came back out in October and do ya think I gave a single thought to the Grafton & Upton? Nope.
Next trip east was a 2+ weeker in 2022 for a friends wedding. Guilford had been done, R&N had been done. I'd been in 1 spot for 4 years and homesickness was sinking in. I was looking backwards and the Grafton & Upton was on my radar for the first time in many years. My fall 2023 trip had them on the to-do list but they didn't get done. Sometime in early spring of 2024 Blazejewski posted a photo of Grafton & Upton rolling through a field bisected by stone walls. The G&U went up near the top of the to-do list. Just about a month later Blaze took me there for my first visit. I saw the church steeple at Grafton but didn't want to chance getting to the field and wanted time to set up.so we went to the field and waited for the train for an hour. It was Erie's final spring, I was relaxing in a New England hay field bisected by rock walls and there was a train coming. It was heaven.
This year was a bit different. Blaze & I got up there relatively late after having a long day of MBTA and 3 lobsters for $50 the day before. Nick Palazini was already up there, Dan Lowe would show up a short while later and we posted up in the woods slightly down track from the mill that served as the end of operable railroad when the article was written in 1997.. I started tooting on my Boston Lager purchased in trade for a good parking spot close to the Crows Nest in Gloucester the day before as the G&U got going out of North Grafton. An absolutely cloudless spring morning in Massachusetts and I was there, the church. The steeple, the photo from half a lifetime ago, the article, the hobby and the sound of an non turbocharged EMD diesels ricocheting off the buildings. It's just wonderful.
G&U 1751, Grafton MA.
Kids mulling around after school on a fine spring-ish day. When the kids are laughing and wearing short sleeve shirts, warmer weather is approaching. These kids were posing after I had taken a more candid shot of them as I was walking down the street in my immediate neighborhood. Turned out to be a great photo with alotta spirit.
"At the geographical center of Yonkers, surrounded by the neighborhoods of Lockwood, Dunwoodie and Runyon Heights, is one of the largest neighborhoods. The area, Bryn Mawr, Welsh for Beautiful Hill, is a 600-acre community between Saw Mill River Road and the Thruway."
Quoted from the N.Y. times 1988.
Image captured by: Eugene La Pia with a Nikon Coolpixx P5100
There is a short sort of "tunnel" where the LA&L passes under the NYS Thruway in Henrietta, NY. It can be photographed with a Southbound using a telephoto lens. LA&L 425 & 433 are Southbound with 35 cars on February 21, 2025. This view is from Erie Station Road.
And now back ... to the present day. Socks and I rode up to Suffern, NY. I shot train stuff with the Mamiya 645, and when the film ran out, switched to digital.
Did I mention getting up at 4am to shoot night snowfall pictures? Yeah, did that, too. This area RARELY has a white Christmas, so when the opportunity came (the snow was supposed to get washed away this afternoon), I gritted my teeth, set the alarm, and took it.