Steamtown National Historic Site (part 1)

Posted on July 25, 2020

I was going through backup hard drives looking for an image an old client needed and I came across these images taken many years ago when a friend took me to Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, PA. I thought it would be interesting since it is hard to travel far for interesting destinations to photograph at the moment. Steamtown National Historic Site is a railroad museum and heritage railroad located on 62.48 acres in downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania, at the site of the former Scranton yards of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. In non Covid times you can actually book trips on some of these to select destinations hours away. I was not really interested in trains (they don’t have wings!), but he convinced me it would be a great day. And it was! It is an amazing place to photograph. Talk about Heavy Metal! I did not know what to expect so I brought a few lenses, but he laughed at me when I included a 70-300mm lens. In the end I only used a 24-105mm zoom. Probably should have included the 12-24mm, but with these huge subjects wide angle distortion would have looked strange. But it was definitely a fun day to Explore & Photograph! There were interesting subjects, details and trains all over the site. But my favorites were the rusting hulks in the storage train track areas waiting to be restored or maybe there for parts. But you have to be aware & careful because off in the rusting hulks there are active train tracks. In this post I will concentrate mostly on restored ones, but I will put in a few rusting ones! Tomorrow I will feature the rusting ones!