I'm looking for footage taken during the Southern Steam Special that 4449 took to reunite with the American Freedom Train.

I am aware of the (little) footage that is shown in the documentary surrounding the American Freedom Train, but are there any railfan recordings of the excursion?

Wow, 49 years ago. I remember it well.

I lived in Alexandria at the time, and I have some slides of the Daylight arriving. I don't think I took any 8mm movies. I hope you find some film. I am sure it's out there.

For something so well-attended and seen at the time, it's amazing today how little documentation exists today of the Freedom Train at some of its movements and display sites.

The problem is not that there's "no documentation" of the AFT.

The problem is that what documentation is out there is 1) generally not "railfan" oriented, 2) amateur material in personal collections that never came to light, and/or 3) professional journalism that was not necessarily archived.

"Civilians" came to see the train and its exhibits, not "railfan" for the most part. They were celebrating the Nation's Bicentennial, not seeing a steam train. There are thousands of photos of people posing on the pilots of AFT 1/4449/610, but not that many of the train itself. Exceptions do occur; the Md. Rail Heritage Library has a whole set of slides of the train's visit to Middle River, Md., next to Martin State Airport--one of the few sites in the area able to handle both the train and a crush of visitors. Remember also that would-be photographers would have been frustrated by the low light and moving sidewalks in the exhibit cars, back when film and flash still ruled--I don't know if flash photography was prohibited inside the train or not.

There's one other aspect of the AFT that makes procuring film of it so difficult: Many, if not most, of its moves between visits were either at night or during daylight in more remote locations. Someone else would have to chime in, but my understanding was that this was in part to help in timekeeping (less interference by other trains), partly to keep down crowds of sightseers and traffic motorcades that could have hampered operations (remember, the fatalities during the Robert F. Kennedy funeral train would have been fresh in many railroads'/planners' memories then), and perhaps also to reduce exposure to vandals in urban areas--then an increasing problem.
And when the train was on display? It sat still. People tended to plan to take movies of moving things--parades, flying planes, races, graduation ceremonies, and the like. You paid dearly for a mere 2.5-3.3 minutes of silent film on a Super 8 cartridge or 8mm roll. Shades of today when you can literally shoot an entire Hollywood film release on an iPhone or the like.

Those all may have been factors. However, I think the main reason is simply that the train would stay open until late in the day for guests. Then once it closed, we'd load stuff up and put the train together. It varied depending on how far apart the stops were, they'd often only allow one day between locations. So after the train closed, pack things up, head out in the wee hours of the night, run to the next stop, get spotted, set up and get ready to open the next morning.

It was a lot like a circus train in that regard, including loading the equipment on the flatcars, though it was only 3 flatcars worth, much smaller than a typical circus. Still, all the gear had to be gathered and loaded onto to the flatcars. Depending the location, there could also be switching needed to re-assemble the consist.

The main focus wasn't on people watching the train go by, it was on being able to tour one of the most amazing mobile museum displays ever assembled. The schedule was driven by moving from place to place as quickly as possible, not waiting for daylight hours. I suspect the host railroads did prefer the late night runs.

Ummmm..... The original post was referring to films made of 4449 when it was running on the Southern Ry during a break from AFT duties.

It has nothing to do with the lack of railfan coverage of AFT movements.

The reason we moved normally at night was to maximize our display hours at each of the 138 display towns. We needed the revenues from the 7.6 million ticket sales to pay the trains way through the 48 states.

Remember the AFT train was funded entirely in the private sector and the payroll of the 94 employees and the railroad track charges,insurance premiums etc.,etc. really added up.

In today's money the AFT was a $ 60 M project. $ 30M came from the 5 co-sponsors ( Pepsi,GM,Kraft Foods, Prudential & Atlantic Richfield ( ARCO ) ) and $ 30M came from the $ 7.6 million tickets sold and the fund raiser lunches & suppers we did in each display town on the 3 VIP cars.

After all the final bills were paid we donated a small surplus left over to the American Cancer Society and Red Cross.

All of us would have preferred to move during daylight hours but the need to pay the bills made it a luxury we couldn't afford.

Thanks, Ross Rowland, Founder AFT Foundation and part time Hogger.

True of course, but even the daytime moves were not documented to the extend where you can find such photos/films today.
I saw the train in Tallahassee, Florida and was at the depot when it arrived there. That entire move was made in broad daylight because the SCL was notorious for special moves being delayed for hours. And in the 50 years since, I have not found any photos of the train heading to or from Tallahassee from Jacksonville.
The news did cover these moves of course, but that was very early video, which likely doesn't exist anymore. Newspapers got rid of their 'morgue' collections of photos ages ago, so this leaves the public.
Most were shooting poor-quality instamatics or 110 negatives, so that means badly faded shots or more likely, dumped into landfills decades ago because, "Nobody's gonna wanna see this". My own mother said we didn't need to bring a camera because, "postcards are even better, anyway."
The train sat in Tallahassee for a few days and I've only ever seen less than half a dozen shots of the train on display, taken by only two people. In the following years, I knew most of the prolific railfans in Tallahassee.
All saw the train.
None had photos.