November 26, 2015 06:48PM
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Registered: 16 years ago
Posts: 14,589
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Hello, again -
I had planned to wait until the 40th Anniversary by Date (11/27) rather than Day (Thanksgiving) to post the following, but since JBWX jumped the gun on me a few days ago, I'll spend a little time here on the NGDF - for which I am VERY thankful - and share a few more memories and photos with those few of you brave enough to be following this thread. (One of whom, our faithful monitor John West - who apparently has no choice but to follow along - has also become a friend and mentor. That's one more thing for an apprentice Curmudgeon to be thankful for today!)
I finally caught up to the train the next afternoon, November 24th, in Sparks, Nevada - two or three miles east of downtown Reno. The weather remained sunny, and not too cold - at least during the day - so I soon set about the task of removing many tunnels' worth of soot and grime from the locomotive - one day to steam-clean the running gear, one day to clean the jacket, skirts and cab, and one day to wash the tender. I was about a third done on the third day when the late U.P. Joe Passentino, at that time a restoration foreman at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, showed up to help. Joe was a ball of energy and good humor - see [
ngdiscussion.net] - and a very welcome replacement for the gang of volunteers following the train, who had mostly scattered to the four winds in order to be home in time for Thanksgiving.
The displays were shut down at the usual 10:00 p.m. on the last day in Sparks - November 26 - and well before sunrise the train was on its way west toward Truckee, Donner Pass and Sacramento. My second attempt at flash photography - a few miles east of Truckee at about 5:00 in the morning - didn't turn out too well. The train had been diverted from the usual westbound track to the eastbound main, farther from the two flashbulbs I had set up, and I had to swing the camera at the last minute from the exiting-the-bridge shot that I had planned - but at least I got a little something for my efforts. The second shot below shows the train rounding Stanford Curve southwest of Truckee, where the grade steepens a bit for the assault on Donner and a bit of snow had begun to fall. By the time we got back to old Highway 40 it was snowing fairly heavily, and I was glad to have the good traction - if not the wimpy engine - of my VW van. Unlike several folks in much nicer cars, we made it up the winding road and over the big bridge near the summit without either sliding into the ditch or stopping to put on chains (which I didn't have anyway), but we were quite a ways behind the train at this point. As we dropped down the west side of the pass the snow turned into a dreary drizzle, but we did catch up to the train near Immigrant Gap
:
By the time #4449 stopped for water at Colfax she was enveloped in the the heavy fog that John West mentioned in his post above. It looks like Andy Adams is on top of the tender, and JBWX is leaning out of the cab of the diseasel behind
:
The fog thinned only a little by the time she crossed the big bridge over I-80 at Auburn
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. . . And followed us the rest of the way through the Sierra foothills all the way to Roseville and Sacramento
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A day or two later I was able to borrow a wide-angle lens for my RB-67 to get this shot of firemen Russ Shipman (l) and Al Phillips (r) in the cab of the engine
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I'm very thankful for this shot of Russ and Al, which turned out to be a financial lifesaver that enabled me to stay with the AFT two months longer than I had originally planned, and to see #610 pulling the train in Texas. Since most people chasing the train were taking pictures of their own, I didn't have a huge market for the b&w prints of action scenes that I was making at rental darkrooms in large cities like Seattle and Portland along the way. The average railfan - and especially modellers - were very interested in the interior of the cab, though - to which most of them didn't have ready access - and I was able to sell enough of these at $2.50 apiece, plus an occasional print of "West of Skykomish"
* and "Along the Columbia",
** to cover my food, gas and photo expenses. Doyle's dad, Roy 'Pops' McCormack, lent me the cost of 100 glossy 8x10 color prints of "Rolling Thunder"
***, which even at the low price of $4.00 didn't sell as well as I had hoped. It took nearly three months of sales to repay Pops, and I had about 40 of them left over when I headed home the following March.
(To Be Continued.)
-
Roosso
* The eighth photo on [
ngdiscussion.net].
** The fourth photo on [
ngdiscussion.net].
*** The fifth photo on [
ngdiscussion.net].
Edited 9 time(s). Last edit at 06/05/2023 10:51AM by Russo Loco.
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