The upper level of my two-level layout is all narrow gauge, depicting a portion of the former Denver & Rio Grande Western’s Fourth Division line in southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico.
Historic RR Photos
These “historic” photos were taken during the late 1960s, early 1970s and 1980s, when US railroads were in transition. Most railroads had declining freight and passenger revenues, deteriorating infrastructure, near-dormant branch lines, and constricting regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission. This led to mergers, bankruptcies, abandonments and more mergers, during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. After having 106 Class 1 railroads in the US and Canada in 1960, now there are only 7. The locomotive builders went through similar convulsions. It was also a time of great diversity mixed with some sadness.
Looking back, I’m glad to have recorded some of it on film, because most of these images can never be captured again – the railroads are “fallen flags” which have been gobbled up by stronger lines; the locations have changed drastically or have disappeared; and the locomotives have been scrapped, with only a few preserved in museums.
Quite a few of these photos were taken while on railfanning trips with my lifelong friend, Larry Tuttle. Larry has already posted some of our photos on his website alpharail.net/histpix/histpix2.htm , including some of my favorites from Rochester NY. Other photos I took while traveling alone. The images always take me back to those great trips.
I took many of these photos during my college years, using either a Kodak Retina S1 manual 35 mm camera with a 45mm lens, or my Dad’s early Pentax SLR with some zoom lenses. In the 1980s I owned my own Pentax SLR, but railfanning took a back seat to work and raising a family. Recently I scanned the negatives to produce the images shown here. Early on, I normally used black & white Kodak Plus-X Pan film, which was inexpensive to purchase and to develop, especially when I did the developing and printing myself in the Physics lab. Now I wish that I had started using color sooner, but when one has been photographing mostly New York Central black diesels, why use color?
References:
When these photos were taken, my main references were Diesel Spotter’s Guide by Jerry Pinkepank (Kalmbach Publishing, 1967) and Rand McNally Handy Railroad Atlas of the United States (Rand MacNally, 1965). Both are well worn and somewhat dog-eared. While several updates of the Diesel Spotter’s Guide have issued since, I still find the RR Atlas invaluable, when wondering how CSX or UP came to own this particular trackage that I’m investigating.
Two newer references are quite valuable:
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The Historical Guide to North American Railroads, Third Edition (Kalmbach Books, 2014), covering over 150 railroads with maps and a brief history of each line. For a longtime railfan, this helps straighten out the dizzying consequences of all the mergers over the last 60 years.
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Guide to North American Diesel Locomotives by Jeff Wilson (Kalmbach Books, 2017). While I used to be able to distinguish GP35s from GP40s easily, I lost it during GE’s Dash 8 and Dash 9 eras. This guide is very helpful. The best part, though, is the individual diesel locomotive rosters of over 120 railroads, present and historic – so when you spot Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis #3001, you can confirm that it is indeed an EMD SD45T-2, formerly Southern Pacific 8515.