All, I found this Confederate Railroads -- History, Maps & Equipment in a search Long ago when I received the Book on The NORTHERN CENTRAL Ry. By Robert L. Gunnarsson from My Girlfriend at the time. Though I Long new of the Railway from my Late Grandfather and my DAD. The Link may be of interest for those who model CIVIL WAR Rail Lines. Tom
I've referenced this site for the UMTRR. Looks like more has been added since last time I stopped by.
Cool, I will have to print off the stock certificate they show for the Buffalo Bayou Brazos & Colorado Railway Company and hang it in my train room.
All , I just saw this on faceb. thought I would share it. (1) Facebook , if link doesn't work here's the Photo. Tom
That pic is for a 3D viewer. They used to be a coin op device that you would set your face in a viewer and then get to scroll through a few pics that were back lit. Being that the images are slightly off center of each other it would give a stereoscopic 3 d effect. They used to be really popular back in the day... Kinda like claw machines are today.
Then they were created for use at home. At first they were expensive, and called stereopticons. Later they were cheap, and called GAF Viewmasters.
Arguably, photographic positives (as opposed to prints made from negatives) are the same tech with different chemistry. In any case, the two cameras spaced x far apart shooting the same subject is the same. At least you don't get the colors muddied by the red and green lenses in your 3D glasses.
The vViewmaster actually used a single image that was built with layering multiple images of each element over one and another. Then the lenses of the viewer would have the image enter your eyes from a slightly different angle to give the full effect of the 3D experience. It was very simplistic and effective. The slightly altering the viewing angle to produce a 3D image is how the stereopticons worked. It's also how our eyes work and how we have depth perception.
Yeah, I just scanned one. With my very old parallel port slide scanner, I can manage to scan the images real well. The locomotive in my sig line below is taken from a disk about Knott's Berry Farm.
Nope. It's a straightforward cross between a simple pocket slide viewer and a stereopticon. There's a reason it looks more than a little like a pair of binoculars.
My Bakelite Model B manufactured sometime between 1940 and 1947. Looks like something Raymond Loewy designed. It was in my parents house when we emptied it out. It could have been from when one of them were a child. I don't remember using this one. I do remember friends of the family had a Model G and hundreds of discs. I would spend hours looking through it. I was always a little disappointed they didn't have any railroad images.
Here is a stereopticon image that I created from a View Viewmaster disk from Disneyland. Then a few single images from a Knott's Berry Farms set.
I remember watching a video on how they made the ViewMaster images a while back. They described it just as I said it, but I had long since gotten rid of my setup so I couldn't verify it. As a hobbyist photographer I knew the way it was described in the video would work just fine for showing a 3D image. I honestly do not remember my disks having 2 nearly identical images on it... but then again that was nearly 40 years ago that I was interested in such things... oh well. I guess a 2 image slide would be a much easier way to make 3D over layered images with slightly different viewing angles.