Railtown Steam

Hardly ever just post about somebody else's post or article. But this one is full o' great stuff, and here's a spot image:

How about that, eh?

Online Resource for Burlington Photos

Daily Life Along the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad (Newberry Library) features hundreds of photos taken in the late 1940's for the publicity project that eventually became the book Granger Country.

 Here's one of the photos:

Lionel 1926

A back-cover ad from the December, 1926 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Click to make it bigger. Wouldn't that make a great poster?

Scenic Railway, Rio de Janiero, 1911

The cover illustration from the April, 1911 issue of POPULAR ELECTRICITY, which I just accidentally stumbled on while searching for something else on eBay. The seller is rhealee8, if you want to see more. I reshaped the photo to make it more, like, rectangular, as it had originally been. Click makes big.

The Last Steam Locomotive Through Greensboro

Photo taken in Greensboro, NC, probably in 1958, by Irvin R. "Buck" Squires, and used by permission of the Squires family.

Thanks to John Squires for forwarding this to us. Click for larger size.

The Bowery, NYC, Elevated Railroad, 1897

I collected this image of a stereoview in 2002, but didn't keep a trail as to its source. It can stand on its own. Click = bigger.

The Elevated Railway and Civic Beauty

In February of 1907, Ernest C. Moses, in an article of that title in the monthly magazine THE WORLD TODAY, claimed that the new elevated railroad system in Berlin was "The most artistic and most thoroughly constructed roadway of its kind in the world to-day." I scanned the article a few years ago, and have now taken the time to clean up the scans of the half-tone photos that were printed to illustrate the text. The captions of the photos do a good job of summarizing the points the author was making.

Here are the pictures: from Berlin, from Chicago, and a two-page spread (combined back into one by the magic of Photoshop) from New York. If you're desperate to read the text, and can't find it on Google or the Internet Archive of the Hathi Trust, send a note and I'll see if I can put it online somewhere. As always, click to see a bigger version.