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"Pennsylvania Avenue Subway" Tunnel (Former Reading Railroad), Philadelphia, 2004. (fedia.io)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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"Pennsylvania Avenue Subway" Tunnel (Former Reading Railroad), Philadelphia, 2004.

#photography

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Captured with a Fuji GX680 camera, 80mm lens, T-Max 100 film. Some tilt was applied to control focus. It was very dark in there, and focusing required the use of a flashlight.

The Pennsylvania Avenue Subway was built to provide a sub-grade freight connection between the Reading Railroad's main line and its "City Branch". It served the Baldwin Locomotive Works' Callowhill plant and, later, the Philadelphia Inquirer's printing plant, among other Center City industries. Abandoned in the 1980's.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The GX680 was a fun but very unusual camera that couldn't quite decide what it wanted to be. It was a truly gigantic beast of a medium format SLR camera providing (limited) view camera movements. It used 120-format roll film with a 6x8cm frame (so a 3:4 aspect ratio), with a built-in autowinder. It's sort of what you'd get if you somehow merged a Nikon F4, a Hasselblad, and a Crown Graphic. Definitely not a point & shoot camera.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fun fact: the Reading was a major northeastern US railroad (made famous internationally by its place on the Monopoly gameboard), which ceded its rail business in 1976 to the newly formed Conrail consortium. But the company kept most of its non-railroad real estate holdings, and today mostly operates cinemas (including NYC's Angelika) in several countries

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

(The Reading company was named after the Pennsylvania city, and so is pronounced to include the past tense of what you do with words on a page, not the present tense).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

@[email protected] Exactly the same as Reading, Berkshire, so I suppose it is just copied. The etymology of the original name is a tribe name, Readingas, meaning in Old Saxon "the people of the Red [one]".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

@[email protected]

Do you have the negative at hand? What is it's actual size in mm?

FWIW, the '85 Hasselblad 500CM here is 53x53mm, the '53 Rolleiflex T is 54x54 mm, and the no longer here Mamiya 7II was a seriously glorious 54x70 mm.

Although I've never used a GX680, I was photographed by one once (they were standard for wedding/family studio group photos here in Japan in the good old days).

[–] jqubed 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Is it a true tunnel or lots of bridges under roads? It looks like there are a lot of gaps to the surface?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

@[email protected] This section is an actual tunnel, with vent holes to the surface to accommodate the steam locomotives that ran through it. Other sections (not visible here except as a light in at the end in the far background) are cut-and-cover, then open trench, and then grade-level.

It was quite an project; there were several contemporary civil engineering journal articles written about it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@[email protected] outstanding image matt