A lost print shows up from 1979: Amtrak's Crescent at Atlanta

It is amazing what might show up in your garage. Case in point: This black and white image of Amtrak’s Crescent in April 1979. I found the print last week in the garage of the house my wife, Cate, and I moved into last year. I have no idea how it got there. In the blender-mixer that is moving – nine times for me since college – the print and I have traveled many miles, first across North Carolina and 12 years ago to Wisconsin. I am as curious as anyone as to why the print, never a favorite or a pick shot of mine, showed up now. I will say this. It brought back some memories of a time almost 40 years ago. Let me explore it with you.

The photo is from 5-by-7 a black and white print that I made sometime early in my life when I had access to darkroom in high school, college, or in my early 20s. I am sure of this because my parents home address in Franklin, N.C. is on the back in blue rubberstamp ink and after 1986, I switched to color slides, Kodachrome to be precise.

The circumstances behind the photo are these: I’d just turned 18 and was on a trip with my parents to the Florida panhandle at Easter break. The Crescent had been in Amtrak’s fold for only two months, Southern having been reluctant to turn over its pride and joy to the newcomer, only 8 years old and still on shaky ground. The train was running with a mixture of former Southern Railway equipment – note the three green and gold E8s – and Amtrak rolling stock: That’s an Amtrak car behind the locomotives. The location was the curve just north of Peachtree Street station in Atlanta, a location that I’d learned about the fall before on my first journey to the Georgia capital with a good camera. I was eager to get as many photos of the much-beloved E units in action before they were deposed, and I am glad that I convinced mom and dad to stop. Only a few months later my pal and traveling buddy, Jim King, and I stalked this train at dawn in Toccoa, Ga., and at dusk in Gainesville, Ga., and found with an unusual motive power consist: An F40 and two Amtrak E8s or E9s of other ancestry. The Southern locomotives were gone, never to return.

At the time, my own railroad photography was in its infancy. Mom and dad had given me a Nikkormat FT3 as a Christmas gift in 1977, and I had made my first railroad images in February 1978. I knew I was late to the party for E- and F-units in regular service, and I was desperate to know more about what they were like before they were gone. I had just made it at the very end.

Amazingly, the following week after making this shot, I was walking down the hall at my high school, and a classmate stopped and asked if I’d been taking pictures at the station that morning. It turned out that she and her parents had decided to take the train to New Orleans, and they’d seen me from a window on the train. It is, indeed, a small world.