It was getting on toward the end of August, 1971 and I was getting ready to head off to college in Boston in another couple of weeks. One of the rites of passage for a young man leaving his home town, I believed, was to take an epic road trip before putting his homestead in the rear-view mirror. In my case, it would be a trip to photograph railroad activities in Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, a little more than two hours distant from my location in the southern part of the Green Mountain state. The only problem at that point was that my car was up on blocks, awaiting a new transmission. My salvation was temporarily found in the form of a well-worn and rough-running ’63 Plymouth Valiant that I bought for $75.