The following were all ending their years of service at about the same time: 35mm film, shops processing and printing it well, and my manual 35mm camera equipment. In 1995, I generally left my old camera and lenses at home and used a new 35mm point and shoot camera which was probably better suited to birthday parties than rolling stock.
On this particular day, probably in late April 1995, there was a remarkable (for us, coming from run-thru Kingston) procession of trains which we could actually contemplate as they came to the Smiths Falls bottleneck, waited for traffic to clear, and went through their crew changes.
The bravado of parking in the Superintendent's base-of-scrap-rail-labelled personalized spot was really the sad recognition that there probably had not been a superintendent in Smiths Falls for some time.
I had started a longer 'essay' on the evolution of photography from Ektachrome slides, to 35mm, to our much better smartphone era.
However, people like KillerBee on YouTube have more eloquently expressed what I was working on. Every coast-to-coast-to-gulf mega-railway can be supervised, and every feature of it can be micro-managed, by a solitary ailing old guy, dressed in sweats, and watching a room full of high definition monitors. The locally commanded armies of workers of the individual railway regions, which existed decades ago ... have been homogenized into a technologically impressive and efficient, but boring, monolithic machine.
Taking, storing, documenting, and reproducing high-quality photos has never been easier. But as one commenter to KillerBee's video noted as a generality: Going to the tracks to photograph 'the same engine on every train' really makes the exercise seem pointless.
