Hi,

I recently acquired a photo of B&O's "Cincinnatian" that ran between Baltimore and Cincinnati from 1947 through 1950. The photo was taken at Grafton, WV, not far from where I live, and about half way through the route. The photographer was Bruce Fales, and it was taken in October 1947 on an East bound trip.

Can anyone tell me about the photographer or more about the train? Is this a common photo, or a "1 of a kind"? Is it valuable? Please note that the photo isn't "blurry" as it appears in the attachment...I just took a pic of it with my camera.

Also, I personally knew someone who rode on the train when it was in service, and I received their luggage tags (perfect "mint" condition) and also their head rest cloths (for lack of a better term) when they decided to liquidate their collection.

I am not looking to sell or otherwise part with any of these items, but am interested in knowing more about them.

Thanks!

For what it is worth, the correct term for the head rest cover is "antimacassar".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimacassar

Bob

Your photo, as well as all other collectible items, is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it.

Thanks so much! I was sure it had an official name like everything else does. I would have never figured that out!

Bruce Fales was a very prolific photographer of the time, best known for his high quality images of B&O subjects.

I believe a book on The Cincinnatian was published a few years ago, possibly by TLC(?).
I don't have it in my collection, so I can't check it for certain.

Tom

Observations:

There are several reasons why it is somewhat obviously not a publicity photo by the railroad--even back then they knew how to airbrush power lines and the like out of photos.

This doesn't match, to my knowledge, any photo we've seen at the Md. Rail Heritage Library, and we've seen tons of B&O photos.

We'd learn a lot more from a properly scanned or reproduced image, of course, but......

That's a good point about the power lines...I didn't even think of that. The photo also has been "colorized" with oil paint, as indicated in handwriting on the back. The photographer's address stamp is on the back, so this is an original print at the very least.

I will likely be happy to share better quality files of this at a later date (although likely not in a public forum setting such as this), but due to its large size I'm going to have to get it professionally scanned and digitized before any considerations like that can be made.

Just buy a USB thumb drive and take the picture to a FedEx-Kinko's. They can scan it to any reasoable dpi resolution. I believe they can do some corrections to the image when scanning, too.

I'd get a drive capable of holding a 'raw' version of the scan, rather than doing even a 'high-quality' version of JPEG compression. We have had some good discussions on RyPN about scanning and file formats.