Railroad Photos by Chuck.com

My name is Chuck Graham, and I’ve been a railfan and model railroader most of my life. It started when I was in grade school and I got a hand-me-down Lionel set from the family.  A year later, Christmas brought my first HO set, and I’ve been hooked ever since.  My Dad and older brother built a really cool 4 x 8 HO layout for me.  Around age 13, I met my lifelong friend Larry Tuttle, who also liked model trains and railfanning, and my interest was kicked into high gear.  I built my first layout, a HO scale folded dogbone around the furnace in the basement, based on the Denver & Rio Grande Western.  It was a little crude, but I learned a lot!  While in college, I built a freelanced shelf layout in my bedroom which was designed for switching. After completing my education, moving to the Midwest, and starting a family, I built two more layouts which never were completed (moving, etc.).  In the late 1980s, I finally had a finished basement room to build my current layout, the Denver & Rio Grande Western, Fourth Division.  This is an HO scale layout, with narrow gauge, standard gauge, and dual gauge – both steam and diesel.  The layout has been on layout tours for a number of years, including National Narrow Gauge Conventions, the NMRA National Convention, NMRA regional conventions, and local narrow gauge meets.  I’ve been working on it ever since, but it is not the only model railroad project on which I’ve worked.

 

Also during the 1980s, my interest in narrow gauge blossomed.  I met the narrow gauge community in St Louis MO at the First National Narrow Gauge Convention in 1981, and have been an active member ever since.  In the mid-1980s, I joined a modular HO narrow gauge club called the Mudhens, founded by Bob Rands of Micro Engineering and named after the K-27 class of narrow gauge steam locomotives on the D&RGW.   Over the years, I have built a number of modules for the club’s portable layout, and have served as club secretary, treasurer, newsletter editor, and president. This club layout won numerous awards at GATS shows in the 1990s, and was on display at National Narrow Gauge Conventions in Denver, Durango, Cincinnati, Dearborn, Kansas City, as well as St Louis.  Photos of some of these modules are shown on a page in this website. In 2007, the club began to build a new 9-table sectional layout, and I have been a major contributor to this effort. Combined with some of our older modules, our 2017 layout at the Denver National Narrow Gauge Convention won 3rd Place in the Modular Layout contest.

 

My interest in photography started as a teen, trying to photograph trains and my home layout using a hand-me-down Brownie camera.  My Dad, a Kodak scientist, bought me a nice moderately-priced starter camera, a Kodak Retina S1.  It was much better, but being a manual camera, I learned early about f stops, shutter speeds, ISO, etc.  Many of the B&W photos on this site were taken with that camera, including many of the railfanning adventures in the 1960s and early 1970s with Larry.  Dad later bought a Pentax SLR with interchangeable lenses, which I often borrowed for railfanning trips – a whole new experience.  Of course, as a working adult, I bought my own, and like almost everyone else, have now moved to a digital SLR, a Canon Rebel T6 with zoom lenses.  Still, I’m impressed with the quality of photos that I took with the Retina.  As usual, the lighting conditions turned out to be the biggest factor in the quality of each shot.

 

If you are interested in my work, or would like to purchase any digital images, please contact me using my email above.  Thanks!