I find the focus of the latest Brief on the Rock Island 4-4-0s and nineteenth century caboose to be very interesting. I agree with Bob Yarger that it would be beneficial to submit any photos from this era to help preserve vanishing history. But I am wondering what the general interest is in this pioneering era timeframe. I have seen reader surveys taken in magazines that find less than 2% of the respondents have any interest in railroads prior to 1900. Personally I find the 1880-1910 era to be fantastically interesting, but I can certainly understand why people are more attracted to the final age of steam. The end of steam was the pinnacle of its development. In those terms, it could be said to have been superior to everything that went before.

But the pioneering era seemed to have an attractive wildness to it. You can see that spirit in the expressions of the countless train crews who stood in front of their engines and posed for the photographer. Sometimes the people are as interesting as the engine. Railroading was young then, but not really in its infancy. It was more like its wild teenage years. Certainly it had been around long enough for designers and builders to learn how to produce some of the most gorgeous looking locomotives and rolling stock. What it lacked in size, it made up for in variety. Even the railroad lines were often quite photogenic with lots of curves and trestles. There were stations and buildings seemingly around every curve.

Even though it was a relatively primitive era, there was a willingness to experiment with some rather advanced ideas that seemed to be almost ahead of their time. I’m referring to things like “Dutch clock” speed recorders in cabooses, changeable panel displays on the sides of express cars to provide a color coded weather forecast, mechanical rotating light beacons on the tops of cabooses, illuminated stencil boxes on caboose cupolas to show the train identity, and classification yards using high production poling and pole cars.

My sense is that photographs of locomotives, rolling stock, and facilities from the pioneering period are not at all rare, but there simply hasn’t been much interest in them. It seems that there are historical societies full of them. A lot of them are of very high quality from large glass plate negatives. The Minnesota Historical Society alone has hundreds of them, many of which are online. A lot of them have been published, but usually not interpreted to any great extent. I would welcome a new dimension of this forum that would gather these images for study and discussion.

RTK

Hear, hear, Mr. Travis.

What you are referring to is the "Golden Age" of railroading. It has much to recommend it because railroads were the high profile industry, attracting the kind of talent that today we would attribute to information age technology.

Morgan (or Ingles?) in a 70's TRAINS byline called it the time "when the railroads inherited the earth." There are historians, professional and amatuer, who are attracted to this era, but it doesn't sell magazines, DVD's or foamer hat pins.

Much of the way we are organized as a society, what some call the Modern Age, is derivative from the railroads and their development. Weather forecasting, standard times, communication, technologies such as metallurgy, etc, etc.

Plus it was just cool: Dash 9's snaking down the grade with their dynamics whining has no compare to little moguls cresting the summit, their exhausts cracking like cannon, whistling for brakes as the brakemen take to the tops. Soon the train would be a smoking, chattering clatter as brute strength on ash staves wound through cast brake wheels, brought 2,000 tons of oak and iron to the foot of the grade. Who needed reality TV?

The loss of the memory of it all is a great grief.

I love the 1895-1910 era of steam. Engines were becoming larger, but they still had decoration. I'd love to model that time period in HO, complete with Vauclain engines.

The Rock Island photos were simply something that was sent to us, that we thought we could share. Preservation sometimes involves more than iron and wood, and old photos give good insight into the past.

Personally, my great grandfather was a Rock Island engineer during that time, and though he didn't last more than seven years at it, his stories to me, plus a couple of similar old photos fueled my childhood interest in trains, as in this piece I wrote about:
http://rypn.org/Dads_engine/. It was a tough job then, and a lot of railroaders had short lives, which is probably one of the reasons he quit.

A while back, I posed an inquiry about a peculiar tender truck that I call the mystery truck. Those trucks on the tender of Rock Island engine no. 574 look like another mystery all their own. There seems to be an unusual amount of space under the frames among other things. One of the interesting things about these old photos is the possibility of discovering some type of mechanism that is essentially lost history. In the case of the photo of no.574, it would take some heavy duty detective work with a sketch pad and magnifying glass though. I have looked at many issues of the Railroad Gazette from the 1880s or so, and am amazed at the zest for mechanical ingenuity and perfection that sought the lucrative market in railroad application, even at that relatively primitive era.

There are a number of other Rock Island 4-4-0 photos here on the Minnesota Historical Society website. Type in "locomotive" on their search blank and start scrolling.

http://collections.mnhs.org/visualresources/

CRI&P 573:

http://collections.mnhs.org/visualresou ... Type=Basic