In the thread, "Mystery Steam Loco Pic of the Month", it was briefly suggested that the image under scrutiny could have possibly been photoshopped. I do not want to hijack that thread, but I do want to mention my own experience with this issue and ask anyone else who has had the misfortune of having to deal with forgeries to relay their experience.

A few years back I was researching a locomotive based in Scranton. I had been able to locate a sizable number of photos of locomotives of the same class or of a similar class but had not had much luck finding pictures of the locomotive I was researching. I mentioned this to a rail preservationist who does a lot of photo research and other work for a museum in NJ. He responded that he had no such issue and graciously offered to send me three pictures of "my" locomotive on its original home road.

When the three pictures arrived in my "inbox" they immediately looked familiar. Fortunately, by this time I had already studied about 100 photos of similar locomotives. A quick look through my archive proved the three to be images of sister locomotives that had been renumbered to "my" locomotive using photoshop or a similar software. One effort was a bit clumsy but the other two had to be blown up and studied to see the misleading modifications. Again, only my familiarity with this particular class of locomotives kept me from mistaking these images as the real McCoy.

So, in the words of Lloyd Millard Bentsen, "you can expect what you inspect."

Your "friend" should be horse whipped! Why would he do such a thing?

John T., I have to apologize if I did not make it clear that the preservation contact who passed along the altered photos did so unwittingly. He did not think to study them because he never considered the possibility that someone would intentionally materially alter an historic photo.

Interestingly, I had been all over the net in my search and had never seen these three pictures in their altered state. Unfortunately, he could not narrow down where he had obtained the scans.

My appologies to your friend. Who ever altered the photos should be horse whipped! Back in the 30s and 40s there was a guy who photographed the logging roads in the Appalachains who would use chalk to letter and number the locomotives he found. He would photograph the same locomotive with several different letterings. Nobody knows why he did this but it has caused researchers no end of trouble over the year.

It rather obvious even in the early railroad years images of engines/trains got doctored to make them look better to the public, and thats before all this digital medium.

For that image I am not even going to rely on whether its doctored or not, I'm taking the whole image and referencing other resources to tie it down, a simple quick doctoring/smudging won't make any difference, it would take a LOT of work to faker up an image like that, and thats from me who's done a lot of video graphics to fix images, someone would have to go to a LOT of trouble to make an image to faker us up.

There's a problem that parallels this: publication of innocently misidentified photographs.

In a Facebook page dedicated to my hometown, someone started posting numerous vintage photos that were quite obviously scanned from commercial publications (the inclusion of the captions was a big hint about that). A couple of them were rather brazenly misidentified, not only by the person posting them, but by whoever compiled the (Arcadia Publishing "Images of America" series?) book(s) from which they were scanned. (Examples: someone identifying a four-foot-high dam across a wide creek as a hydroelectric dam that was in reality 35 feet high across a narrow creek; misidentified bridges; etc.) When I attempted to correct the record, the original poster took issue with me repeatedly, for the litany of usual reasons. ("You're not from around here; I am!" Well, being born and raised there, and my parents owning and publishing the local paper, and my owning all the history books the paper used to have don't count for anything? "Books don't lie!" Ummmmmmm....) He eventually went running to the group owner, who is a close friend of mine, and demanded I be blocked or banned. The group owner, now in the newspaper business himself told me he told him "Actually, he's completely right, and you are violating copyrights anyway....." He stormed off in a huff.

Ever seen someone try to justify that something existed because a model was made of it? I have. I'm sure someone out there has argued there was a GG1 with Alco Century C-C trucks and a fuel tank, based on the Tyco model.

I guarantee you this attitude will be prevalent every time someone attempts to correct an obvious mistake or deception of such a nature. Go look what happens when someone tries to correct an eBay listing of what is falsely alleged to be a "GGI HORN" or a "UPEE BIG BOY WHISTEL". (The collectors who track these things say that of 278 and 25 of the two items respectively that should have existed, at least 1,000 and 150 of them have shown up in collectors' hands.) Or reproductions passed off as the "real thing." People don't want to hear that 1) they were deceived themselves; 2) their ancestors lied to them, or they misremembered what they said; 3) you know more than they do about the history; and/or 4) you're trying to cut their profit from the sale.

Every time a misidentified or falsified photograph or historical account gets published, it enters, and thus alters, the historical record. There was a lot of attention shone upon numerous errors, a couple egregious, in Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like It In the World. Yet it will end up the "best-selling" account of the history of the Transcontinental Railroad whether we like it or not. There have been allegations that at least one "noted" historian of Eastern railroads simply made up information and accounts out of whole cloth, to the point where anything he wrote should be eyed with suspicion. I'm wagering he has a West Coast or Canadian or traction doppleganger. But if the only place corrections or errata to such records are noted are buried away in some book review in the R&LHS Bulletin or Electric Railway Assn. newsletter, seen by only a few academic rail historians, then what?

PRR had a shorty GG1 like P5 modded for crew safety



nothing like the c-c truck model, which might be an attempt to get a gg1 design to run on sharper curves.

How successful were the railroads in making sure that no extras were ever made to cover breakage or theft? Were they always able to prevent the manufacturers from making lots of 1,000 or 150, and supplying the extras to other customers?
An extreme case to drive the collecting authorities crazy. When the Ed. G. Budd Manufacturing Co. shut down and had their liquidation auction, they included SPV-2000 cars that had still been in various stages of construction for stock. Apparently they were built from the top down, because if you wanted the last 2 in the production line, you were bidding on a pallet with 4 genuine SPV-2000 horns on it!Where are the corrections or errata to that book buried, please?

Horns and whistles, with rare exceptions only in the case of whistles, were made by other manufacturers (Hancock, Nathan, Leslie, Westinghouse, Lunkenheimer, etc.) and supplied to locomotive manufacturers, and occasionally also directly to railroads. Exceptions definitely abound and some railroads (PRR, SR, N&W, etc.) did build at least some of their whistles, but in most cases there is little to no difference between a Hancock long-bell three-chime that was used on, say, the Western Maryland versus one on the Lehigh Valley, Union Pacific, or whatever, save for maybe a different arrangement of the valve lever or whatnot. The whistle-collecting fraternity for years was something of an "insider cult," and they quickly learned to distinguish who really had access to what whistles versus someone trying to pass off a random shop whistle as a "real NYC whistle of the 20th Century Limited". The real collectors tend to talk in terms of who made the whistles, not what railroad/etc. it came from. To this day, eBay is full of folks trying to pass off ridiculously small thresher whistles, communication whistles, and even auto exhaust whistles as a "Railroad Steam Whistle", occasionally with laughable attribution; and when you attempt to post questions to correct the record, they take offense at best, and block you and delete your corrections at worst.

The GG1 horn is the best example. The horn used on GG1s was a Leslie A-200-156: http://atsf.railfan.net/airhorns/a200.html They were quite widely used during that era, not only on other PRR electrics but on later diesels and even marine applications like tugboats. Ditto the Westinghouse E-2 which originally started to replace it. So there are a LOT of A200's out there, and dishonest sellers found they could make much more hawking it as "from a PRR GG1" as they could saying it came off a tugboat or from a switcher.

Railroad air brake departments were typically entrusted with the maintenance and upkeep of air horns, and as anyone who has seen horns swapped from loco to loco on a smaller railroad can testify, they don't keep a lot of spare horns in reserve, and they get quite diligent at switching out parts. The Westinghouse horns, though originally smaller and cheaper than the A200, quickly fell out of favor because of a complex diaphragm design (I think we counted 27 parts in the one diagram I had!) and difficulty in opening them, while the later Leslies and Nathans that replaced both were simple to open with cheap, almost "disposable" diaphragms. So no, there weren't 1,000 horns swapped about GG1s. Maybe 300 total over 139 G's each having two horns, maybe.

As near as I can tell from the photos, the "stock" air horns Budd put on SPV-2000s were run-of-the-mill Leslie S-2 or S-3L sets, maybe with Budd- or Leslie-built "sno-cone" screens on front. The only thing nice about that auction lot was that they were new stock, and didn't need any maintenance or retuning. Did Mechtron/Delaware Car get the horns as well as the spare shells? :-)



Ask and you shall receive:
http://utahrails.net/articles/ambrose.php

Thanks, and the 4 horns did have snow cones, my bid of $40 didn't get them, and I don't know who the winner was.

Ten times that would have been something of a bargain for ONE of them--assuming they were three-chime sets on manifolds.

The 2 car sets of SPV-2000 horns, identified that way in the Budd Co. auction catalog, were all single horns, no triples on manifolds. They seemed long and thin to me, who is not a horn expert.

THREAD DRIFT ALERT

I went looking at in-service photos of SPV-2000's, and what I was coming up with was at least two horns pointed forward atop the center of the cab. The PRR/PC/Amtrak Metroliners had what Leslie used on an S-2 horn set (a 37 and 55), but separated into two individual horns atop the cab on either side of the headlight--originally 1960s dome-backed, later some were upgraded with "tab-back" Leslie "power chambers." (I removed several on the scrap line for the Railroad Museum of Pa. for their donated Metroliner--that's how I know!) Looking at more photos yet, I'm seeing a common-manifold S-2 on the CDOT ones, but one on Metro-North that looks like an S3L.

So........... whatevs, dude. ;-)

My web site includes a page of imaginary New York Central locomotives that were never built, as a "spoof" feature. One of these is an image of the streamlined, shrouded K-5 Mercury Pacific, to which I added the famous "lightning stripe" motif with a faked commentary. Both the page and the images on it are clearly labeled "imaginary" and "fantasy," but a model manufacturer picked up the idea and actually produced a small run of HO models of the "lightning stripe" Mercury Pacific. I am just hoping they made it clear to all buyers that such a locomotive never existed. You can see my doctored photo and the HO model here: http://www.railarchive.net/nyccollection/nyc_4917.htm

I am reminded, in this connection of a popular Lionel model of a steam locomotive. It was a 2-6-4 with a tender (not a tank engine). No such engine ever existed, of course, and I don't know what prototype they had in mind and modified. Model train manufacturers were playing around with historical accuracy long before digital image altering became available, such as my Bachmann Pennsy B-6 0-6-0 lettered for the Santa Fe. Oh, that reminds me, there is a Thomas Kinkade painting of a village scene with a steam locomotive stopped at a depot; the tender is clearly lettered "Lionel Lines."

It's dangerous to throw around absolute quantifiers.