In East Tennessee there’s a very nice excursion railroad, called the Tennessee Valley Railroad. It offers a short run option from Chattanooga up to Missionary Ridge, through a hand cut, Civil War era tunnel, behind one of a variety of nicely restored steam locomotives. At the top, there’s a turntable and you can watch them turn the steamer around—very cool!
Or, you can board a three and one-half hour run called the Hiwassee Loop, departing from Etowah Tennessee, south of Knoxville, and re-live the glory days of the Louisville & Nashville’s passenger service over the L&N’s mountain lines that wind east and south toward Georgia alongside the scenic Hiwassee River.
Carleton E. Watkins Cape Horn near Celilo, Columbia River, 1867 Oregon Historical Society
After Promontory: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Transcontinental Railroading was put together by the Center for Railroad Photography & Artand published by Indiana University Press. With the sesquicentennial of the Golden Spike looming, the creators of this book chose this time to look back not only at the Pacific Railroad, but also the subsequent transcontinental railroads, and the myriad ramifications of the industry, writ large, since Stanford wielded the maul on May 10th 1869 at Promontory Summit.
After Promontory begins with a forward by Robert D. Krebs, former Chairman, President, and CEO for BNSF Railway, which lays out the structure of the book, followed by an introduction by H. Roger Grant, historian at Clemson University. Grant provides us with a concise history leading up to the first transcontinental road, later known as the Overland Route, including Asa Whitney’s dream as well as the concrete, and prescient, results of the Pacific Railroad Surveys of 1853. He pivots nicely to how photography functioned as a marketing tool for all of the eventual railroads that made it deep into the West. Established railroad historians Keith L. Bryant, Don L. Hofsommer, and Maury Klein provide the book’s major essays—the reader may recognize these names from their own dog-eared histories of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the Union Pacific Railroad respectively. Drake Hokanson, a photographer/writer who has covered the original route of the first transcontinental railroad extensively, penned the final essay, with a focus on the symbiotic relationship of railroads and photography in the 19th century, and he supplied many images as well. Peter A. Hansen, steward of the journal Railroad History, performed editing duties. (It should be noted that I contributed nine photographs to this volume—five large plates and four small illustrative vignettes.)
Mr. & Mrs. Henry Wilhelm (former Margaret Mitchell) in California
Henry Theodore Wilhelm was born in 1905, in the middle of arguably the most exciting and constructive decade in American history. The Panama Canal, electrification of mainline railroads such as the New Haven, huge new steel bridges and other infrastructure improvements, all were part of investment in America and her future. The list of what was deemed possible, and then doable, goes on and on.
At age 14, Henry became fascinated with railroads, and especially with the thousands of manned interlocking stations and cabins. This led to his lifelong hobby of documenting these unusual places, which the railroads had built as a necessity for preventing collisions, given the high volume of trains transporting passengers, mail, and freight all across the country. Over time, he photographed more than 2,500 junctions and the towers that controlled them. His notes were precise and detailed, and his negatives individually numbered and described in his log books.
I suppose you get used to it: the dishes rattling in the cupboard, the thundering locomotive, the diesel fumes invading the front porch, the clack of wheels on steel rail, the wait in the driveway for a train to pass.
Life along the tracks. It may be hard for railfans to appreciate that if you live this close to trains, the railroad becomes commonplace, or perhaps a nuisance. The early morning noise, your favorite TV show drowned out by a train—the railroad is an inescapable part of your day to day life.
The crew of the outbound Steptoe Valley Flyer prepares their train for a fifteen mile round trip to wye the train at Keystone, Nevada, before boarding passengers on Train No. 3 heading to Cobre, Nevada where the line meets the Western Pacific mainline to Reno. At the helm, 4-6-0 number 40, built by Baldwin’s Philadelphia plant in 1909, pumps air in anticipation for her run up Robinson Canyon.
16:00 hours February 9th, 2019.
Fireman Con Trumbull, fresh in from Casper, Wyoming, and trainmaster Angie Stevens, a local in the town of East Ely (and engineer for today’s run), chat about slow orders, bulletins, and happenings reported on the 145 mile stretch of Nevada Northern mainline that await their nighttime run to Cobre, as the aroma of coal begins to fill the air inside the cab.
