NEB&W Presents Soph Marty's Photo Album - Freight Cars - WLast Update: 2007-06-05
Many of the photos in the Clark Propst Photo Album were taken by Soph Marty. (See Clark Propst's Photo Album for these.) Soph has gotten a scanner and now is sending them on directly. He is starting with "A" and working his way through the alphabet.
In addition to thanking Soph for sharing them with the rest of us, Richard Hendrickson has been nice enough to jot down some background information, to put these cars in context.
- SD
Marty photo of Western of Atlantic box car no. 18180. (It is unusual
to see a box car in motion with its door open.)
It was photographed on a train pulled by CGW locos nos. 803, 807, 809, 806, and 805
pasing through Mason City, IA on March 6, 1971.
Soph said those were the days when, if stopped by a freight train,
it was fun to watch the cars go by. Now days all he sees are containers,
hoppers filled with coal, and jumbo grain hoppers, all really very unexciting to him.
(I would have to agree it is relatively unexciting, but for me it is rare anymore
just to see a movingtrain.)
Soph said his slide said it was in the MLW yards, but he didn't recognize the background. Mike Moore confirms that it was the MLW yards, who said: "It looks to me like it was taken on the old RIP tracks at the Milwaukee Mason City yard. There used to be an Shell Oil terminal along the southwest side of the yard about where Wendy's sits today and the RIP tracks parallel that."
Richard Hendrickson said: "The WofA and Atlanta & West Point were the two railroads comprising the West Point Route from Atlanta to West Point, at the Georgia - Alabama border, and then (via WofA) on to Montgomery and Selma, AL. Also under the same joint ownership was the Georgia R.R., which ran from Augusta to Atlanta, thus providing through service under one mangement all the way from Augusta to Selma. If that sounds to you like a railroad from nowhere to nowhere with nothing much in between, you won't get any argument from this Yankee. But the three y'all short lines pooled their orders for motive power and rolling stock and thus acheived some modest economies of scale. They would order, say, 100 freight cars and then divide them up among all three roads according to what their immediate needs were. WofA 18180 was a Pullman-Standard PS-1, and you can bet that the other two roads also got some new PS-1's at the same time that the WofA cars were delivered.
