Richard Jay Solomon, innovator and rail enthusiast, dies at 85

Richard Jay Solomon, of Monson, Mass., passed away suddenly on Sept. 10, 2025, following several months of illness. He was 85 years old.

Born in New York City to Alfred P. and Bessie Solomon, Richard was an only child and grew up in the Bronx. As a child, he traveled by train with his parents, making early memorable journeys behind steam locomotives into the Catskills on the now long-forgotten New York, Ontario & Western. These and other journeys encouraged his lifelong passion for railroads, travel, and photography which earned him countless friends with whom he shared his interests. His love of railroads was not just a hobby but a way of seeing the world — one frame, one journey at a time. He passed this love of travel and railroads to his sons, Brian and Sean. Richard was married to Maureen Daniel in April 1965 and his family moved to Monson, Mass., on July 13, 1973.

Richard had a long and unusually productive career working as a magazine editor, transportation planner, research associate, and scientist. He was a visionary inventor and was instrumental in the development of advanced communication and information technologies. Mr. Solomon was the co-author of the book The Gordian Knot: Gridlock on the Information Highway (MIT Press 1997). Through the 1980s and early 1990s, he was a research associate at MIT’s Media Lab and served on various U.S delegations to the International Telecommunication Union to help establish HDTV standards, consulted for the U.S. State Department on telecommunications and HDTV, and was a consultant on information technologies to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris and the European Commission in Brussels. He held more than a dozen patents and patents-pending on high-density information storage, telecommunications, computer, Internet protocols and applications, and imaging devices. From the late 1990s, Richard was Senior Scientist at U-Penn studying the interfaces between super high-speed networking, electronic imaging, and the human perceptual system. Over the past decade, Richard had worked tirelessly as a partner in Creative Technology LLC in the development of high-density Write Once, Read Forever data storage. In 2019, this was tested by NASA on the International Space Station. In his spare time he and Maureen had been regular participants in the Monson Arts Council’s annual art shows, while his railroad photographs have appeared in dozens of magazine articles and books. He and Maureen loved to visit art museums and listen to concerts.

He will be remembered for his unusual intelligence, and countless hours spent sharing his knowledge of trains, photography, history and technology with friends, family, and fellow travelers, inventors and railroad enthusiasts.

A celebration of life will be held to honor Richard’s life on Oct. 19, 2025 at 1pm at the Lombard Funeral Home in Monson, Massachusetts. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations be made in his memory to a railroad preservation society or museum of your choice.

Richard is survived by his devoted wife of over 60 years, Maureen (Daniel) Solomon; his two sons, Brian Solomon and his wife, Kris Solomon, and Sean Solomon and his partner, Isabelle Dijols.