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Last Run

The End of Mail Service on the Chesapeake & Ohio

Postal clerks busy sorting mail on the go. The RPO car is on one of the C&O passenger trains that ran between Washington, DC and Cincinnati, Ohio.
F. Douglas Bess, Jr. Collection

The Railway Post Office (RPO) was in existence for over 130 years and was an efficient way to move mail throughout the United States. Mail was sorted in-route for destinations to insure timely delivery. The RPO car was off-limits to passengers, and postal clerks were armed with pistols.

October 28, 1967, however, marked the end of through RPO mail service on Chesapeake & Ohio passenger trains between Washington, D.C. and Cincinnati, Ohio. Although some limited sorting of mail still existed, it was really the beginning of the Post Office Department’s move to handle mail on trucks and planes throughout the U.S. Read more

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Poetics of Place

I grew up in a neighborhood in the Bronx (the only part of New York City, as I always love to point out, that’s on the North American mainland) that was adjacent to the mainline of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad and its no longer active Van Ness yards. This was in the 1940s. As a little kid I’d take walks there with my father, and marvel at the trains, tracks, and rail-side and yard hardware—the signals, towers, cranes, etc.

Although our apartment was small by most anyone’s current standards, my parents managed to find room to somehow set up a small Lionel O -gauge layout for me and my brother. The engine had to be Santa Fe. Why? A little kid fixation I suppose. During the war my father’s business relocated him to Amarillo, Texas. He went ahead to get settled. My Mommy and I followed. We rode out on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (at least west out of Chicago) on the Super Chief. That catchy McGuire Sisters song was regularly on the radio too. These sorts of things stuck and sunk in. They still resonate to this day. For many of us who loved railroading from early on in life, those early experiences perpetuate some essential atoms of our childhood throughout the course of all our accumulated decades. Read more

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Editor’s Notebook

In the Shenandoah Valley – January, 2018
Anniversary

The Trackside Photographer is entering its third year of publication (we launched on March 3, 2016) and I want to thank everyone who has followed along with us. I am most grateful for the many contributors who have been wonderfully generous to share their photography and stories with us, and who make this site possible.

One of the joys of my job as editor has been the opportunity to see hundreds of your photos from around the world. I have learned a lot, both about railroads and photography.  Looking at the work of others inspires and fuels our growth as photographers, and that is the simple idea that keeps us on track.  There is more to come in 2018.  Join us! Read more

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Trackside Interview #4 
Steve Crise

Steve Crise is a professional still photographer and lighting designer based in Los Angeles, California. His love of trains led him into photography, and his work has been featured in Railfan & Railroad, Trains, CTC Board, Railroads Illustrated, Model Railroader’s four articles on Rod Stewart’s HO scale layout, and annual report work for the BNSF and Union Pacific. He teaches each February at the Nevada Northern Railway on the basics of night photography using his electronic strobe equipment. Steve is active in several organizations devoted to the preservation of railroad history and has traveled widely to document the remaining traces of our railroad heritage.

Edd Fuller, Editor, The Trackside Photographer – Steve, shortly after I started The Trackside Photographer, I wrote to you asking if you would be willing to write for us, and we subsequently published a great article by you called “Macro vs. Micro.” I want to thank you for that, and for taking the time to talk with us about your work. Although you are a professional photographer with clients in many different fields, the railroad seems to be at the heart of your work. How did your love of railroads come about?

Steve Crise – I’m not entirely sure how my interest in railroads came about but legend has it that I used to cry in my car seat at the Southern Pacific’s Fletcher Drive crossing when my mother would often get stuck at that crossing. Her accounting of the situation would have you believing that I hated those noisy trains, but I think it was more about not being able to see them well enough from three car lengths behind the gates. Whatever it was that lit the flame it has stuck with me all these years. And to add fuel to that fire, it seems as though just about every Christmas I received some sort of toy or model train as a gift. Wooden trains, plastic trains, Marx, American Flyer, Tyco—it goes on and on. Aside from the modeling, I used to draw and paint a lot when I was a kid. I always had some sort of project going on. The American Flyer was always set up around the Christmas tree and once we moved into a larger home, I was allowed to build a small HO layout. The layout added to my interest in real trains because naturally I wanted my layout to look as real as possible. Read more

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The Glenapp Boys

Keeping the Dream Alive

Two thirds of the Glenapp Boys: Dennis Sibson (left) and Rob Sibson stand outside the cabin at Glenapp that they hope to stabilize and restore. Alan Sibson was not present the day this photo was taken.d

Early on a typical grey, warm and humid January morning, I find myself driving down the rough road that runs alongside the Australian Rail Track Corporation’s (ARTC) crossing loop (siding) at Glenapp, near the border between the states of Queensland and New South Wales. The last time I was here was in 2007 to observe the electric staff working be replaced by the new Remote Control Signalling installations ARTC was putting in on the crossing loops at the north end of its North Coast line. Back then, the vehicle access down to the signal cabin was poor, and hemmed in by rampant vegetation of numerous weedy varieties, while the signal cabin itself looked to be on the verge of going the same way as the electric staff machines it housed. Now, as then, the place is quiet, with just some bird song and an odd low rustling sound in the background. Read more

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A Trackside Photographer—Canadian Style!

Canadian Pacific #9371 traveling westbound between Ingolf, Ontario and Caddy Lake, Manitoba,. through the Canadian Shield.

This past New Year my wife and I took a vacation to the Whiteshell Provincial Park where we spent ten days in a cabin so that we would have two weeks to do nothing except relax and do all the stuff that we love to do in the Canadian wilderness.

The Whiteshell Provincial Park is located in the boreal forest of Eastern Manitoba, which is also part of the Canadian Shield named after the jagged granite terrain.

So to begin my story as a “Trackside Photogapher”, I find myself standing along a Canadian Pacific (CP) main line waiting for a westbound freight. Trains were on a holiday schedule, so I had some time between freights to think.  I ask myself and wonder what it’s like to be a Trackside Photographer in Kansas, or Virginia, or some of those cool places where there is so much more diverse landscape to capture. “Not sure”, I reply to myself, as I ponder in envy. But I am a Canadian Photographer on the prairies, and I endeavor to make my photography fresh and unique . . . so let me tell you how a good ol’ prairie boy makes his train photography unique. Read more