Ghost Spur | Restoration Obscura

Ghost Spur: Albany’s Abandoned Rail Spur
Albany once ran freight trains directly into the second floor of an 11-story warehouse.

Built by the New York Central Railroad in 1927, Central Warehouse was designed for industrial-scale cold storage. A two-track spur carried refrigerated boxcars into the building, allowing freight to be unloaded within the massive concrete structure.

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography + Media. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction of text, images, or film content without written permission is prohibited.

Nearly a century later, the rails still curve through the empty loading floor. They are now being removed as crews dismantle Central Warehouse as part of a $14.6 million demolition project.

A surviving piece of railroad infrastructure hidden for decades inside one of Albany’s most familiar ruins.

This photograph was taken more than a decade ago with permission. Do not trespass, particularly inside abandoned or structurally unsound buildings. Central Warehouse is now an active demolition site beside active rail lines.

Photograph by John Bulmer / Restoration Obscura. New feature drops tomorrow. Restoration Obscura is a top 100 Substack

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography + Media. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction of text, images, or film content without written permission is prohibited.

Abandoned Church | Restoration Obscura

Abandoned Church | Undisclosed Location 
Restoration Obscura Field Research 

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography + Media. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction of text, images, or film content without written permission is prohibited.

The Nevada National Security Site | Mercury, Nevada

Nevada National Security Site (Formerly the Nevada Test Site)
Mercury, Nevada
36.6614° N / -116.0183° W

Supporitng images for the Restoration Obscura feature: American West Series: The Nevada Test Site
Learn more at www.restorationobscura.com

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography + Media. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction of text, images, or film content without written permission is prohibited.

The Ghost Neighborhood | Restoration Obscura

The Restoration Obscura Photo Feature:
The Ghost Neighborhood
Guilderland's Abandoned Residential District

For a period of time, this anonymous residential ruin read like a dystopian movie set dropped into the heart of one of Albany’s bedroom communities, sitting directly beside the largest mall in the Capital Region. Just beyond the tree line, Crossgates Mall drew roughly ten million visitors a year, while a few hundred feet away an entire neighborhood sat boarded, silent, and slowly dissolving. Homes once built for postwar families were held in corporate suspension, secured but unmaintained, waiting out failed expansion plans, delayed approvals, and the slow recalculation of land value.

This long-form photo essay documents that interval of limbo, when a functioning suburb briefly became something unrecognizable. Ice-laden roofs, unplowed streets, camouflaged plywood, and domestic infrastructure slipping back into landscape reveal how erasure often begins long before demolition. The images trace a form of abandonment driven not by collapse or disaster, but by patience, policy, and time.

You can access the feature on Restoration Obscura or listen in the Substack app.

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Hoosac Tunnel Alignment Tower Ruins | Restoration Obscura

Hoosac Tunnel Ruins Mapping Project
Alignment Tower Site Ruins Above the East Portal

Above the East Portal of the Hoosac Tunnel, surface evidence of the alignment system used during excavation remains fixed in place along the projected line of the bore. What survives is not a single structure, but fragments of a larger measuring network once stretched across the mountain.
On Spruce Hill, the remaining material consists of the lowest course of a stone alignment tower. The masonry rises only slightly above grade and is partially embedded in soil, leaf litter, and seasonal debris. No superstructure survives. The stones mark the base of a tower erected to hold optical instruments used to maintain a straight line of excavation over the mountain. Later disturbance to the area, including power line installation associated with the Central Shaft vent building, likely accounts for the removal of the upper portion.

On Rowe’s Neck, just east of the East Portal, the alignment point takes a different form. Four heavy iron spikes remain driven directly into exposed bedrock, defining the footprint of a survey platform at that location. No masonry is present. The absence of stone debris suggests a structure built primarily of timber, mechanically anchored rather than constructed as a permanent stone tower. Only the iron elements remain, preserved by material rather than intention.

From this position, the alignment extends across the Deerfield River valley toward the East Portal and bridge. Dense vegetation now interrupts direct sightlines, but the spatial relationship between sites becomes readable during reduced foliage. Looking upslope from the portal area, a faint linear scar on the mountainside traces the former Western Union pole line that once carried communications and power supporting tunnel construction.

These features document how alignment was maintained over many years of excavation. Fixed reference points were established on the surface, repeatedly measured, and used to transfer a straight line underground through bedrock. Once their role was complete, the towers were dismantled or allowed to decay, leaving only stone bases, iron anchors, and scars in the landscape.

In total, six alignment towers were constructed across Hoosac Mountain to accomplish this task. Working together, they formed a continuous surface geometry that allowed crews digging from the east portal, west portal, and central shaft to meet with extraordinary accuracy for the mid-nineteenth century.

This documentation forms part of the ongoing Hoosac Tunnel Ruins Mapping Project, focused on identifying and recording the surface infrastructure that made underground excavation possible. You can find all my content on the Bloody Pit, including long-form features and podcasts, on Restoration Obscura.

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Hoosac Tunnel Compressor Building Ruins | Restoration Obscura

The Bloody Pit Project
Ruin Mapping, Hoosac Tunnel

I recently returned to the Hoosac Tunnel to continue mapping peripheral ruins, moving outward from the main bore into the industrial landscape that once sustained excavation. Among the most intact of these remains are the ruins of the Compressor Building, set low along the Deerfield River, pressed into the bank and partially reclaimed by forest.

In the earliest years of construction, progress through the Hoosac depended on hand drilling. One man held the steel while another struck it, blow after blow, advancing inches at a time into hard rock. It was slow, dangerous work, and injuries were routine. The introduction of pneumatic drilling in the mid-1860s altered the scale of the project entirely. Muscle gave way to machinery. Speed increased. So did the demand for power.

The Compressor Building was constructed to supply that power. Positioned beside the river, it housed large compressors that fed pressurized air into the tunnel. Water from the Deerfield was diverted through a hand-dug sluiceway extending roughly half a mile upstream, an ambitious system intended to drive turbines below the building. The river proved unreliable. Seasonal flow fluctuated, output dropped, and steam power was later added, layered onto the site rather than replacing it outright.

Today, the structure survives as a partial shell. Stone walls slump inward. Machinery openings frame leaf litter and river light. The turbine pits remain the most legible features. Rectangular recesses cut into the ground mark where blades once spun, their shafts rising vertically to the compressors above. These voids still read clearly. Water below. Air above. Rock ahead.

What remains here explains how the tunnel advanced at all. Without compressed air, drilling stalled. Without the river, the compressors fell silent. The pits, foundations, and shaft recesses mark the point where water was turned into force, and force into excavation. This was not a peripheral structure. It was a choke point.

This area became known as the Bloody Pit for good reason. Accidents were frequent. Equipment failed. Men were crushed, struck, drowned, or injured beyond recovery. The name reflects labor realities rather than legend, a blunt acknowledgment of the human cost embedded in the ground itself.

The photographs from this visit focus on those remaining traces, turbine pit recesses, wall courses, foundation lines, and the way the site continues to interact with water, gravity, and decay. This is preservation by record. Once the machinery is gone, the ruins become the archive.

Additional documentation, including field analysis of both portals of the Hoosac Tunnel, the alignment towers, and other associated ruins, can be found through Restoration Obscura. That work emphasizes historical context and on-site observation without publishing precise locations or maps. The rail lines that pass through the tunnel and over the adjacent trestle remain active, and rail infrastructure is unforgiving. Trains move quickly, quietly, and without room for error. These are working corridors, not abandoned spaces, and discretion is a matter of safety as much as preservation.

Learn more at www.restorationobscura.com.

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
www.bulmerphotography.com | www.johnbulmermedia.com

www.noreasterfilms.com | www.restorationobscura.com

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Canal Boneyard Field Series | Restoration Obscura

Canal Boneyard Field Series | Restoration Obscura 

Exploring ruins is always compelling, regardless of scale or setting. As part of my ongoing fieldwork with Restoration Obscura, one of the core goals is to document and identify lost and erased structures embedded within modern landscapes and built environments, treating them as an archive rather than as anomalies.

Some of the most compelling sites I encounter are tied to water. Rivers, canals, reservoirs, and floodplains conceal and preserve material history differently than land does. As water levels drop in winter and ice begins to bind along the shoreline, structural forms that remain invisible most of the year can briefly surface.

In this case, the ruin is not vertical. It lies low in the water, revealed seasonally when river levels fall and winter locks the surface into ice, in a quiet reach where industrial traffic once moved steadily through the interior waterways of the region. What appears first are outlines, long rectangular hull forms pressed just beneath the river’s surface. Then details come into focus. Parallel longitudinal timbers. Upright iron fasteners. Frames spaced with the regularity of working boat construction rather than shoreline infrastructure.

At a distance, the exposed framing reads like rib cages laid side by side, the structural skeletons of working boats gradually opening as water, ice, and time strip them down to their load-bearing elements.
As shoreline growth recedes and water levels drop, forming ice lightens the surface and the dark timbers stand out in contrast, briefly revealing the hull geometry. What remains reads as exposed hull structure: bottom planking long gone, deck timbers collapsed or missing, framing members still holding their spacing as the vessels settle flat into the riverbed.

These remains are wooden canal barges, often referred to as scows, built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for use on New York’s canal system. Their flat bottoms and rectangular hulls were engineered for shallow, controlled waterways, where boats moved slowly under tow, carrying bulk cargo such as stone, timber, grain, and coal. Construction was heavy and utilitarian. Thick longitudinal timbers formed the hull. Cross members supported decking that has long since disappeared. Iron drift pins and spikes held the structure together, many of them still standing where the surrounding wood has failed.

When rail transport and the modernized barge canal system rendered these vessels obsolete, they were not preserved or dismantled. They were simply no longer useful. Many were towed into shallow slackwater and abandoned, where they settled into the riverbed. Seasonal ice fixed them in place, while floods and decay gradually rearranged what remained.

What survives now is a boneyard. Not a single wreck, but a cluster of working boats left behind when the system that relied on them moved on.

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Hoosac Tunnel Compressor Ruins | Restoration Obscura

Hoosac Tunnel, East Portal Compressor Ruins

Restoration Obscura Hoosac Tunnel Ruins Mapping Project

Winter settles over the last surviving arch of the East Portal compressor works, a remnant of the three-story building that once housed the turbines and machinery that fed compressed air into the Hoosac Tunnel. The stone was cut from the same schist the crews pulled from the eastern heading, and it once supported a floor that shook with water power drawn from the Deerfield River. Compressed air and the new Burleigh drills changed the pace of construction in the late 1860s and marked the moment when the project finally began to advance through the mountain.

Today the arch stands quiet in the falling snow. The turbine pit is buried, the sluiceway is hidden in the hillside, and the upper floors have slipped back into the forest. Induction artifacts and scattered infrastructure fragments remain throughout the landscape, small traces of the power systems that once drove work inside the mountain. These ruins are part of the Restoration Obscura Hoosac Tunnel Ruins Mapping Project, an effort to chart the full industrial footprint of the tunnel and the long reach of its past. The Bloody Pit is far more than the eastern and western portals and the central shaft. It is an entire corridor of work sites, alignment towers, and industrial ruins stretching along the Deerfield and up the flanks of the Hoosac Range.

You can find more information about the Hoosac Tunnel on Restoration Obscura or by listening to Episode Three of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast.

© 2025 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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www.noreasterfilms.com | www.restorationobscura.com

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Poestenkill Falls | Restoraton Obscura

Poestenkill Falls // Troy, New York
42°43'14.79"N / 73°40'42.16"W

Photographers have been making images from this spot since the 1800s, when early practitioners carried heavy cameras and fragile glass plates into the gorge to fix the falls in long, deliberate exposures. Some of the region’s earliest landscape photographs were made right here, recording the same stream and dramatic movement that continues to shape the descent today.

To honor that lineage, this photograph was created through century-old optics, using glass crafted in the era when those first images were made.

Long before photography reached the Capital District, the Poestenkill powered the early industrial rise of Troy. The falls drop into a narrow gorge cut through the Rensselaer Plateau, and that dependable fall line made this one of the city’s earliest and most productive mill sites. By the early 1800s, water from the Poestenkill was being diverted through races and flumes to drive textile mills, tanneries, iron works, and small machine shops along its banks. This industrial corridor shaped Troy’s growth and helped cement its reputation for iron, stoves, bells, and later shirt manufacturing.

The falls remained a landmark even as the surroundings industrialized. Nineteenth-century photographs show mill buildings perched close to the gorge and footbridges spanning the water, evidence of how closely the natural drop and the built environment once intertwined. As industry shifted and many of those structures disappeared, the falls retained their basic form, shaped far more by geology than by the machinery that once worked at its edges.

What survives today is the same stepped cascade that drew early photographers, mill workers, surveyors, and naturalists. The river has carried on through changing eras of industry, decline, and restoration, leaving the falls as one of the most steady and familiar features in Troy’s evolving landscape.

© 2025 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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www.noreasterfilms.com | www.restorationobscura.com

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Return To The Hoosac Tunnel | Restoration Obscura

Restoration Obscura Photo Feature: Return to the Bloody Pit
Eastern Portal, Hoosac Tunnel
42.6937° N, 72.9994° W

Last week I returned to the Eastern Portal of the Hoosac Tunnel with antique cameras and a plan to map the forgotten ruins that still line the slope above the grade. The bare trees and gray skies of November fit the reputation perfectly. Scattered through the woods are the foundations of compressor housings and the stone footings of the old alignment towers, built to keep the tunnel’s twin headings perfectly true as engineers bored from both sides of the mountain. These remnants frame the eastern approach to one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century.

To the left of the main portal lies the 1853 test bore, an early attempt to cut into Hoosac Mountain using a newly designed steam-driven rock drill. The experiment advanced only about ten feet before the machine shattered against the rock and seized. The shallow recess that remains, mostly buried in loose stone and runoff, marks the site of that first setback in a long and punishing effort to push a railroad through solid mountain.

Construction of the Hoosac Tunnel continued through two decades of political scandal, contractor disputes, and technological change. Workers blasted and drilled their way through nearly five miles of rock, facing deadly gases, flooding, and frequent explosions. The 1870 collapse of the central shaft and the earlier 1867 shaft fire, when thirteen men were trapped and suffocated underground, cemented its grim reputation. In all, more than 190 men died driving the railroad through the mountain. Newspapers began calling it The Bloody Pit, a name that stuck as stories spread of ghostly lights and phantom voices deep within the bore.

Today, the eastern portal exhales a steady draft of cold air from the depths. Beside it, the remains of that 1853 test bore sit half hidden in the slope, a scar of ambition, invention, and loss at the mouth of one of America’s most haunted works of engineering.

You can explore more about the Hoosac Tunnel on Restoration Obscura, and hear the full story in The Bloody Pit, an episode of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast, available wherever you listen.

More at www.restorationobscura.com

© 2025 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
www.bulmerphotography.com | www.johnbulmermedia.com

www.noreasterfilms.com | www.restorationobscura.com

All Rights Reserved 

Night Ruins | 09.23.2025

Night Ruins | Saratoga County, New York

This 19th-century ruin likely served the canal economy, built of local stone and brick, with a chimney suggesting industrial use. Structures like this once lined canal corridors, supporting mills, warehouses, and workshops that moved goods through the interior.

The interior with concealed LED panels, a method I’ve used on barns, farmhouses, and abandoned roadside ice cream stands. The red light creates visual contrast, making it easier to read the structure’s layout and surface detail. It emphasizes openings, material changes, and what still holds together, while adding a degree of mystery to spaces no longer in use.

Remnants like this are part of the ghost infrastructure still found along the edges of historical industrial zones, structures left behind as canal routes shifted and economies moved on.

You can read more on my Substack Restoration Obscura.

© 2025 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
www.bulmerphotography.com | www.johnbulmermedia.com

www.noreasterfilms.com | www.restorationobscura.com

All Rights Reserved 

Why the Night Still Matters: Introducing Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night

 

Why the Night Still Matters: Introducing Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night
By John Bulmer, Restoration Obscura 

Most of us don’t experience real night anymore.

That’s where this all began, not with a dramatic realization, but a quiet one. The kind that settles in slowly, sometime around 4 a.m., when the sky above is hazy with glow and the Milky Way is nowhere to be found.

After seven months of writing in the early hours before sunrise, I completed a book that explores that quiet shift and what it means. Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night is now available, and it’s the first publication from Restoration Obscura Press, created to support future work exploring lost histories, vanishing landscapes, and the ways we remember.

This project grew from years of photographing the night sky and watching it change. Even within the last 20 years, the stars have faded dramatically. Today, more than 80 percent of Americans live under light-polluted skies. A child born in a major city may never see the Milky Way.

We’ve lost more than just a view. We’ve lost part of our cultural and ecological compass.

Field Guide to the Night traces how darkness has shaped us,from ancient rituals to Cold War infrastructure. It’s both a personal record and a historical investigation, divided into four thematic sections:

• Darkness and Defense explores wartime blackouts, surveillance towers, and our attempts to control night.

• Sky and Spectacle looks at how celestial events like auroras, comets, and eclipses have shaped human belief across cultures, including Indigenous cosmologies and sky traditions.

• Silence and Survival follows the people who move through night to work, to migrate, or to stay safe—night laborers, fire lookouts, bootleggers, and more.

• Light, Lost and Found examines how artificial illumination affects our sleep, mental health, ecosystems, and the fading night sky itself.

This book is part of a broader effort to understand and protect the night. It’s a companion to my ongoing work on Restoration Obscura, a Sunstack and podcast that explore hidden histories, overlooked places, and the quiet truths shaped by darkness.

Every time there’s an eclipse, a comet, or a burst of aurora, people flood social media with awe. We still look up. The sky still connects us. The question is whether we’ll keep that connection alive.

You can learn more about Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night at fieldguidetothenight.com or read the original post on the Restoration Obscura site. The book is available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon.

Thank you for reading—and for helping keep the night alive.

We were never meant to live without night. We were meant to remember it.

Book Details
Publisher: Restoration Obscura Press
Publication Date: June 1, 2025
Language: English
Print Length: 368 pages
ISBN: 979-8218702731
Availability: Amazon Prime eligible | Available worldwide on Amazon
Price: Paperback: $14.99 | Kindle: $9.99

Buy now. 

© 2025 John Bulmer Media & Restoration Obscura. All rights reserved.
Content is for educational purposes only.