Thursday, January 19, 2017

There's a lot of info here

This photo of the Car Department tracks in St Thomas is a wealth of detail information.
While the subject matter of the photo is the remnants of Wabash #2254 following a tragic boiler explosion, for me it's a gold mine for detailing an area of the yard that I'm actively working on right now.
First is all the short bits of track holding spare wheelsets. There a lot of them and note the way the rails are doubled up to gain space by offsetting pairs of wheelsets.
Then there's really narrow gauge track for some kind of work cart. I'd love to see a photo of the cart. And note how the rail joints are not offset.
There's that water supply in the foreground. Simple enough, but it's a detail often overlooked.
Just behind the caboose, we can see the lights on the pole. I do know from other sources that there were 2 of these poles. The 2nd would be to the right of the photographer.
If you look closely you can determine where it's cinders and dirt, and where the weeds and other greenery would be.
Lots of detail info to work with here.
I find that I spend more time looking around the edges and in the back ground of photos than I do at the primary subject matter in railroad photos. There's so much to see and to learn about.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The narrow gauge track is probably 2-foot gauge. Carmen used a modified track lorry to move stuff around the rip track in the days before forklifts and tow motors. The GTR had these in a few car shop and rip tracks. Mainline Modeler ran photos showing such a system in use in Hamilton. The GTW East Yard in Detroit about ten years back still had a short section of two-foot gauge track running right into a storage shed where freight car parts were kept.

Steve Lucas