By Aengus Habersaat/photos by the author
While many short lines operate a weekday-only schedules hampering the working or school bound photographer, the Black River & Western regularly fields a crew on Saturday using an EMD switcher type locomotive, often SW1500 1596, with a typical sign-up time of 7:00 a.m. and normally beginning the day at Three Bridges, New Jersey. After many years of declining freight volumes due to manufacturing and agriculture fleeing the Garden State, the Black River & Western began seeing an uptick in traffic in late 2019 and into 2020 thanks to inbound lumber to a transload site in Ringoes and a new customer that ships concrete caskets…