"Pennsylvania Avenue Subway" Tunnel (Former Reading Railroad), Philadelphia, 2004.
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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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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.
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.
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.
(The Reading Company was named for the Pennsylvania city, and so is pronounced with the past tense of what you do with words on a page).
@mattblaze@federate.social I didn’t know this, that is a fun fact indeed!