Through the Tunnel, No.1

THREE UPCOMING SLIDE TALKS

Apr 27 @ 6:30 PM - Hagaman Memorial Library, East Haven

May 4 @ 7 PM - Windsor Locks Public Library

May 17 @ 6 PM - Wolcott Public Library

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: A full trip through the tunnel might begin here. Behind me the roll-down gate has rusted shut, but that’s where the yard locomotive could push a flat car, so workers in the machine shop above could roll back the wooden roll-top cover and lower giant, crated machine castings for assembly in factories near and far. They say one machine for crushing sugar in Cuba required 60 train cars on its way to the docks in Bridgeport and one whole ship to take it to Havana. 

Beyond the shadowy passageways on the left is where the original dirt road passed beneath the cantilevered corner of the machine shed above, and that road still continues by these sheds and turns and enters another portal where light first pierces inside the tunnel ahead.

Once this track rolled on through the next portal, where the tunnel continues behind a wall of ancient, paned glass, across the factory road and on past a new gate to a shed where a truck is the only object left in a roll shed where machinists and welders finished and packaged giant calenders and chilled iron rolls bound for copper mills and rubber mills and paper mills and plastic mills and sugar mills and anywhere that rolling was part of manufacturing, and the track continues beneath the intersecting bridge to the sand elevator into a final shed that ends where the Farrel property ends and American Brass abuts. The shed is marked on the 1911 map, “Heavy Machine Work,” and is still, today, surmounted by two massive sixty-ton cranes.