In 1988, my wife and I along with our two children, took the "Eaglet" (Houston Section of the Texas Eagle) to Dallas and back, to visit my brother and his family. Here are my kids on the platform in Dallas in front of the EX Santa Fe high level car that we would ride on for the trip back to Houston.
Nice, old Santa Fe cars were cool to see. Like the older Amtrak Phase II paint scheme too, latest is too plain.
On a frigid Presidents Day, a westbound BNSF grain load grinds over Des Lacs Reservoir at golden hour.
Oh, yeah. It was their first of a number of trips on Amtrak. As adults they still ride trains, especially when visiting the UK or Europe. Here is a photo of my daughter in an upper birth on the Cardinal traveling from Chicago to Clifton Forge, Virginia.
Now that it has warmed up around here, I shall post a cold looking photo. Classification yard at Proviso Yard in Chicago. December 1942. Jack Delano photo. Library of Congress collection.
Oh, that's normal for that model. They have their own, built-in waste gas burners like oil refineries. Doug
Mini skirt, gogo boots, the word "mod", psychedelic font, magnetic tape data storage. When was all that? An ad in Trains Magazine from way back when.
A clever way to walk the line with technology, featuring a new fangled computer in the photo (it's behind the gal if you hadn't noticed ), while also appealing to old skool shippers who distrust 'em. In the early '80s, I did railcar tracing on a Telex machine that looked something like this.
Could be the late 1950's, maybe early 1960's. Of course I could be mistaken about this ad. Back then, even into the 1970's, the public, ad agencies included, still thought of computers as "brains" represented by many spinning tape drives. Beginning in the early 1960's IBM and others began replacing 10-1/2" tape drives with multi-platter 15' (IIRC) disks in a plastic housing with a handle that were dropped into a disk machine that sat on the floor. The industry was quickly phasing out the more expensive, slower tape drives.
SOU 525766 Boxcar, 50', one of thousands on the road just like this one. Photo from the mid-1970s, but I can't remember where. In my career with a large shipper, SOU was a valued source for clean and mechanically sound boxcars, though one day in our warehouse I recall seeing where someone had read Southern Serves The South and chalked below it "As They Damn Well Please".