My first day-off

My first train picture. (The camera leaked light.) (Photo by BobbaLew.)

“What to do?”
My first job was at a religious boys camp in northeastern MD on Chesapeake Bay in 1959.
I was a “counselor-in-training,” CIT, also a stablehand.
I had already been a camper at that camp five times, mainly at the behest of my hyper-religious father, who wanted to “straighten me out.”
How I landed that job I’ll never know. I wasn’t religious.
But I could write a good story.
The job didn’t pay much, only $20 per week, plus meals of course. I stayed in a regular camp-cabin, 10 campers and a counselor.
When regular counselors were off, I’d stand in.
I was there only five weeks of 10, and the first week was getting ready = no campers.
So, that prompted my first day off, a Sunday: “What to do?”
I had my father’s old Kodak HawkEye camera, so I went down to the waterfront and took a picture of our swim area.

My first photograph. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

At that point to water is tidal, and tide was in.
Although I saw higher.
That tee-dock had to be reassembled every year.
That was the first photograph I ever took.
So now what? I was alone.
Engage railfan interest. (I’m a railfan, and have been since age-2.)
The Pennsylvania Railroad’s electrified mainline to Washington DC, now Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, was 5-6 miles inland. Maybe I could hitchhike to that.
Hitchhiking was the only transport I had.
So I walked out the camp road maybe a mile or two to MD 272, the main road down the spit of land we were on, a peninsula.
Someone took me all the way into town, where the railroad passed through.
272 used to cross Pennsy at grade, but an overpass had been recently built. Trains blasted through at 100 or so, and fatalities occurred.
I got out at the overpass, and hiked down the bridge embankment. I was waiting for a train.
All-of-a-sudden WHAM! A GG-1 express blasted through.
I snapped a picture, but ya don’t stop a train doing 100+ mph with 1/125th of a second.
That’s my first train picture (the lede). I’ve taken thousands since.
Would that I could go back and take those GG-1 pictures with what I know now, with current equipment.