This year for Argus Day, Ye Olde Photographer continued with a twenty exposure B&W film spooled from a bulk roll of Kodak Panatomic-X (expiration date December 1988!) It worked out last year, so here we are again.

Below we see a selection of the Argust 15th shots; 28 year old film in a 58 year old camera! The film was developed in Kodak HC110, Dilution H (1+63 for 10.5 minutes at 67.5ºF. We started to scan the negatives with a PrimeFilm 3650u 35mm film/slide scanner. On the third frame it began making noises like a rock crusher and produced a scan with odd horizontal distortions. A small broken internal part was epoxied together and has held long enough to scan this film. YOP suspects he might be wise to consider the possibility we are at new scanner time! The "official" submissions from multiple participants may be seen through the Argus Collectors Group site.

After some deliberation, we pointed the car toward Boyertown, in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Last year on Argust 14th we recorded some bridges and scenes along the southern end of the Colebrookdale Railroad - The Secret Valley Line. (The RR is also on Facebook.) This year we hit the northern end. The line dates back to around the end of the Civil War, providing transport for raw materials and finished goods to or from the growing iron industry. For decades it was part of the Reading Railroad in its various incarnations. The line still offers and provides some freight service with connections to the Norfolk-Southern at Pottstown.

In checking out the railroad's website we discovered they just received an 0-6-0 side tank type steam switching locomotive. To Ye Olde Photographer's delight, it was reasonably accessible on the 15th. The intent is to restore and get it running as detailed on the project Facebook page. Although at first sight it looked pretty pathetic, YOP was told the basic structural and mechanical stuff is believed to be solid and it has a fair chance of running. Unfortunately there was some pretty noticeable cosmetic damage to the cab and side tanks in the process of hoisting it on or off the flatbed that transported it, but a small army of volunteers will go to work on it.

As with many of these once a year ventures with elderly all mechanical and extremely manual cameras, this year's event was not as smooth sailing as hoped. The end of the film (which was spooled from a bulk roll by YOP) apparently pulled out of the cassette in a flurry of trying to catch shots of a tour departure. This was not discovered until the camera was opened to swap in a new roll of film. Since the film had not rewound, the last four or five shots were toast, but most survived. Without a changing bag in the car (YOP doesn't own one) we couldn't take the finished roll out. So we finished off a roll of Delta 100 in YOP's Minox B and took a few color shots with the iPhone and went home. The camera was opened in the darkroom and the film loaded directly into a developing tank. Had the processing disclosed a bunch of lightstruck disasters, we would have gone back out, but since most were OK, we called it another successful Argus Day!