NEWS AND OTHER STUFF WE THOUGHT OF Down Memory Lane: Reliving Trips While Scanning Slides
THERE IS NOTHING QUITE LIKE A WALK down memory lane. I’ve recently been doing a lot of that, thanks to an ongoing project that occupies much of my spare time. I’ve been scanning my slide collection, and I’m finding everything from happy memories to trips I had forgotten about to places I don’t even remember being. It’s been quite the ride. I started this project a few years ago, and
it’s had some starts and stops. The biggest stop was about two years ago when my Nikon LS-5000 slide scanner went on the fritz. I thought Nikon was out of the scanner business, but after a year of idleness I finally contacted Nikon and discovered the scanner could be fixed and at a reasonable cost. Since then the scanner has been running almost non-stop again. My collection consists of probably somewhere around 140,000 slides, of which I have around 70,000 scanned (the scanner does get a workout). I started taking slides in earnest in 1980 (I have a handful from before then) and stopped in 2006, when I went digital. All the slides from 1995 onward are in slide pages in three-ring binders. Before 1995 the slides are mostly still in the yellow Kodak boxes that came back from Fair Lawn, N.J. Before 1987 the slides are in a couple of half- baked attempts to get organized, with some in Logan boxes and others in yellow slide boxes. Getting organized made the collection very unorganized. Go figure. To keep things fresh all the time, I have
two concurrent scanning streams going. One stream is simply working backwards month by month starting from my last month of shooting slides, April 2006. That stream is now back to February 2001. The other stream starts at the beginning of when I started
62 MARCH 2016 •
RAILFAN.COM
TOP: Quebec Cartier Mining’s big MLWs lead an empty train out of Port Cartier, Quebec, on September 10, 2001. One day later this trip would have a dramatic twist. ABOVE: FL9s rest in the Metro-North yard in Danbury, Conn., in September 1983. With FL9s running on both MN and Amtrak, New York and Connecticut were common destinations in the early 1980s. STEVE BARRY PHOTOS
shooting in 1980, but to vary things up I move ahead one year and one month as I finish each month. The last three months I have scanned in that stream are July 1998, August 1999, and September 2000. The next month would be October 2001, but that’s already scanned as part of the other stream, so the next month up will be October 1980. I alternate streams as I scan. I also have about 30 Kodak Carousel trays that contain old multi-media
slide shows, so I’ll scan a tray of those in between changing months. As things stand right now, I have three months scanned of every year from 1980 until 1994, four months scanned of every year from 1995 until 2000, and everything except February 2001 for the years between 2001 and 2006 (save for the loose slides from various projects scattered around). Every slide that gets scanned gets a green dot in the upper right corner; thus,
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