Dave Abeles

Dave Abeles was born and raised in western New Jersey in the United States. A lifelong fan of trains and railroads, Dave grew up watching Conrail freights wind through the hills and valleys near his home and always enjoyed building models of the trains he remembered. Traveling and music with family were big parts of his youth. The railroad hobby press introduced him to the glory of the American West, an impression made permanent by a family trip in 1989. Several friends who also enjoyed trains began to photograph the railroad scene with Dave in the early 1990s. This began another lifelong fascination with the railroad operations as well as the great railroads of the American southwest. Dave graduated from Syracuse University with a civil engineering degree in 1999. The career that followed has been in railroading where he works as manager on a major northeastern passenger railroad. He lives in northwestern New Jersey with his family that has become accustomed to the Onondaga Cutoff, the HO scale model railroad in the basement depicting Dave's childhood memories of Conrail.