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Collection of Railroad Articles. A by James DuBose Soft Cover SIGNED
A Collection of Railroad Articles by James DuBose SIGNED
Soft Cover
66 pages
Copyright 2007
CONTENTS
Introduction 4
My Powder River Experience5
A Day in Egypt24
The Day the Circus Came to Town32
The Flashcube Fiasco37
Exploring Norfolk Southern's Wabash Wishbone39
Exit BNSF, Enter Sandman 59
INTRODUCTION
I have been interested in trains most of my life. My father gave my older brothers Lionel train sets for Christmas before I was born and I loved seeing them in action. Unfortunately, our basement had a tendency to flood after heavy rains. One of the floods destroyed most of the Lionel tracks and we were without toy trains for several years. Then one day my oldest brother Allen bought me two Tyco HO train sets from Service Merchandise. I remember him saying under his breath "I shouldn't do this," but I think Allen was just as anxious as I was to "play trains" again.
As far as real trains go, my hometown of Lombard, Illinois was located on the Chicago & Northwestern (C&NW) railroad. As a boy, I often rode my bicycle on the Illinois Prairie Path which paralleled the C&NW on the former Chicago Aurora & Elgin right of way. I was also very much into football as a boy and I liked the fact that the C&NW diesels were painted in the same colors as my favorite football team, the Green Bay Packers. During the late 1970's, my sister Jane and her husband lived in an apartment overlooking the C&NW in Wheaton, Illinois. It was from their balcony that I took my first real railroad pictures.
However, it wasn't until 1985 that I learned about railfanning. I met Rick Conrath in graduate school at the University of Illinois. Rick started taking train pictures in the 1970's and had even worked a few years for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. After discovering that life in Palestine, Texas wasn't the future he had hoped for, Rick left the railroad and went back to college to get his Master's degree. Rick and I both went to Washington D.C. in January 1985 to attend the Transportation Research Board meeting. While there, Rick and I managed to make a side trip to Potomac Yard to photograph trains. I saw railroads there that I had previously only seen in magazines. I was hooked and I have been taking train photographs ever since.
Over the years, I have had dozens of my photographs published along with a couple of articles. I have also sold and traded tens of thousands of slides. Trying to get published has been sometimes rewarding, but often very frustrating. I'm not a fan of most of the railroad magazines. I don't care for the "artistic" photographs they tend to favor. They remind me of the story about the emperor's new clothes and I feel like the little boy who points out that the emperor is naked. I have also found that magazine publishing is very incestuous. It is very common for the magazines to print articles and photographs from the same people all the time. I have even seen several cases where one magazine has published an article from someone on the staff of a rival magazine. Unless you know someone, it is very hard to get your foot in the door.
I finally decided that the only way I was going to get my work to the public was to publish it myself. This book is a compilation of articles I have written over the years that have not been published or were so severely modified by the editor that they bore little resemblance to my original work.
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