Saint Paul might one day get light-rail service again, but until then, the very few surviving mementoes of the TCRT - the Twin Cities Rapid-Transit company - are all that remain of the city's nostalgic fascination with streetcars.
Saint Paul might one day get light-rail service again, but until then, the very few surviving mementoes of the TCRT - the Twin Cities Rapid-Transit company - are all that remain of the city's nostalgic fascination with streetcars.
The best-known remain of that once-mighty empire is the near-mythical tunnel beneath Selby Avenue. A few-hundred feet of track at what was once the lower end of the tunnel are the last such tracks visible in the city; the tunnel itself has been sealed at both ends for quite some time. The upper entrance is completely filled in and paved over; the lower entrance is a featureless wall.
Fortuitously, in the summer of 2005, a vandal managed to chop a small hole in that wall; never ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, a handful of local photographers who became aware of the entrance took the opportunity to photograph the tunnel one weekend. A few weeks later, the wall was repaired, and it'll probably be another decade before anyone gets to see the much-fabled tunnel that runs, more or less, below the cathedral.
The poured-concrete tunnel is more than twenty feet in height, and carries two parallel sets of streetcar tracks. All the wiring and other equipment that once ran thru the tunnel is long gone; the only contents of the tunnel now are a large volume of trash, dating mainly to the mid-to-late 1980s, when it seems to have been a populous homeless camp. The remaining section of the tunnel is perhaps slightly over a hundred-yards long, and terminates at a solid concrete wall at the upper end.
As is often done, scores of tea-candles were used to illuminate the tunnel for the photographs. Where possible, they were concealed from the camera behind pieces of garbage found in the tunnel, to avoid flare and the "thousand points of light" look that is a love-it or hate-it kind of thing. This 6x7cm image was shot on 120-format Fuji Superia 100, a slow-speed transparency film, in a tripod-mounted Rapid-Omega 100, with a 90/3.5 Super-Omegon. Exposure was several minutes at f/8. Some minor adjustments were made to the digital scan to produce a more pleasing color rendition than the dark reddish-orange "seen" by the film.
In some ways, the large Rapid Omega might be the closest thing to a "perfect" camera for this sort of photography. SLR viewfinders are rarely bright enough to be useful for underground photography, though some are much better than others. Rangefinders, on the other hand, let you compose with pretty much anything you can see with the naked eye, rather than relying on guesswork or tedious games with flashlights. The huge 6x7cm "ideal format" negative dwarfs 35mm images, producing unbeatable image quality. The Omega is also a famously indestructible camera, used by a generation of pro wedding photographers, police officers, and soldiers in day-to-day use. They were excellent cameras then, and still, for some things, impossible to beat today.