Found Abandoned

One of the advantages of being a studio photographer is that you get a range of jobs. This may or not be good in terms of working, for example, This time of year is school photo time and this week I was given several of these school jobs. The down side is that you may be required to travel and have to carry a portable studio along with you; the upside is it helps the expense sheet…. This past week I have been working down state, south of Kingston, New York State, in the Catskill Mountains some 100 miles from home so with a 5am start and getting home at 6pm, it has not left me much time to sit down and write for my blog. Mother nature wasn't kind to me making sure sunrise came after I arrived at the school and ensuring rain was falling on my return journeys, making photographing the mountains almost impossible.

On Friday I was traveling home on a back road when I noticed some abandoned rail cars at the side of the road. With my love of things abandoned, I pulled over in a convenient space at the roadside and took some photos. With the pouring rain and me huddled under a very large umbrella camera round my neck, some passing motorists looked at me as though I had just escaped from the local asylum. A marker tells the public that this was once part of the O&W Railroad.

The Ontario and Western Railway, was a regional railroad with origins in 1868, the last passenger train departed Kingston for Oneonta in 1954, the company then lasted until 1957 when it was ordered liquidated. The O&W holds the distinction of being the first major U.S. railroad to be abandoned in its entirety. The railroad began life as the New York and Oswego Midland Railroad in 1868. Its mainline ran from Weehawken, New Jersey to Oswego, New York, a port city on Lake Ontario. It had branch lines to Scranton, Pennsylvania; Kingston, Port Jervis, Monticello, Delhi, Utica, and Rome in New York. The part south of Cornwall, New York was operated over the New York Central Railroad's West Shore Railroad via trackage rights.

It was obvious that the rail cars had been there for some time… and even more amazing was that they were on both sides of the busy Rt 209 and the rails were still across the road. The Catskills Mountain Railroad now appear to own these abandoned cars…In 2008, CMR volunteers rebuilt and reopened the first sections of track in downtown Kingston and introduced the Kingston City Shuttle. With the goal of crossing the Esopus River and climbing Mount Hurley to reach the Ashokan reservoir, volunteers rebuilt almost two miles of track through the historic city of Kingston. The section by route 209 was left as was and today is the start of a public/county rail history trail.







Having taken the rail cars, I noticed the Esopus Creek was next to me. Even two weeks after Hurricane Irene, the creek was still many times its normal width, normally the creek is clear water maybe 20 feet wide, a pretty looking watercourse, today it was still over 100 feet wide and a muddy brown colour. Looking at the fields along the creek, one could see the damage to farmland that Irene caused. There were acres and acres of what three weeks ago before the storms had been corn almost ready for harvest and which were now little more than stalks in a muddy landscape.