Eliphaz wrote:SM89 wrote:I too wasn't born yet. It wish this stuff was still around so that i could see it. There are some photos, but not really any videos 
Too true. hand held VHS cameras were just beginning to enter the consumer market at that time and were still expensive and bulky. 8mm film was also expensive, and the picture quality was just horrible. It would be great to find some kind of recorded video or moving pictures of the old orange line elevated that could be rendered into digital video.
There's a ton of video documentation of the end of the Washington St. El, including news footage and uninterrupted footage of an entire Chinatown-Forest Hills trip and back. Charlestown El has old Super 8 footage of the same, but it's very poor because of 1975 technology. Search YouTube...they're all on there.
Arborway...and Watertown...didn't get that treatment because unlike the Els coming down these weren't supposed to be permanent closures. Yes, people rightly doubted the T's real intentions, but after all they did build a new Green Line stop at Forest Hills, did run test trains on temporary track from the yard to Forest Hills and back in 1986 during construction, and did replace every inch of street-running track from 1987-89. It was supposed to come back all along. And even with Watertown there was a lot of track reconstruction in the 1980's through Brighton, a restoration lawsuit chugging along that lasted until 1994, and some hope that if the PCC rebuild program ran to completion and netted the full number of rebuilt cars they'd planned for (it didn't) that an over-full fleet of working Boeings, a new car order of CLRV's or ultimately the Type 7's, and like-new PCC's would allow them to restart A-line service with the PCC's relegated to one of the two street-running branches. That line too might've gotten a Super 8 filming of one of its 1970's or 1980's fantrips if it were a fait accompli that the line would be gone forever.
Frankly, we're lucky the Arborway line was so well photo-documented in late-'85 by railfans fearful that it'd never return after the pending construction. There's very few A-line photos outside of Watertown Yard, and save for some convenient vantage points on the line almost no online photo history of it in revenue or fantrip operation or complete documentation of what every stop or stretch of track looked like. That shutdown came with a lot less warning because it was car shortage-induced. People knew a couple years out the E was going to be shut for sprawling reconstruction work at the portal, on the street-running track, and at Forest Hills.
