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Great Railroad Photographs U.S.A. By Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg Signed Numb
Great Railroad Photographs U.S.A. By Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg
Hard cover boxed edition signed by Authors
Cardboard box. Hard cover
Numbered edition #1653
243 pages
Copyright 1964
INTRODUCTION
The happy accident of emergent chance which brought the railway age into being almost coincidentally with the means phototo record it and which saw the improvement and sophistication of the one parallel the same advances in the other for more than a century was amply matched by the accidents of mischance and of human fallibility which must have accounted for untold numof magnificent photographs which will never be available to posterity.
The mortality of the photographic record, especially in the nineteenth century when all pictures were exposed on sensitized glass plates of great fragility was, it may be assumed, tragically high. One must say assumed because it can never be known what priceless negaand their only slightly more durable prints have disappeared without a trace due to breakage, fire, neglect and a degree of human stupidity that fairly congeals the marrow of appreciative intelligence.
Horrid stories have been verified of entire collections of rare photographic record of now vanished aspects of the railroad scene deliberately erased from glass plates and half-plates and the resulting ravished glass used for panes in greenhouses. The entire pictorial files of American Car & Foundry, an invaluable document in the story of a great industry, were deliberately destroyed a few years back by an officious dolt in authority who esteemed them worthless. One rare collection of New England pictures dating from the early years of overland transport that had been lovingly gathered by a dedicated historian was destroyed after his death by his widow who had always been jealous of them and now found herself in a position to take revenge upon the inanimate souvenirs her husband had cherished. One presumes the fires of hell in which she will spend eternity are fed with cellulose film.
A reportedly magnificent collection of irreplaceable photographs of the nineteenth century railroads of the Connecticut countryside was lost when the Naugatuck River rose and flooded the cellar in which they were stored, eliminating forever the record as it had so often eliminated the tracks of the carriers themselves. The list of tragedies in which great numbers of historic photographs disappeared must include the San Francisco fire of 1906 and only the happy circumstance that vast quantities of old time Southern Pacific negatives dating from construction days were stored in the chief engineer's office at Sacramento has given the world a coherent iconography of that great and powerful carrier.
In at least one case the tables, ironically, have been turned and a railroad itself was inin the destruction of a portion of what must have been an incomparably valucollection of historic glass plates taken of the destruction immediately after the Great Chicago Fire. Detroit photographer Jex Bardwell, apprised of the progress of the holocaust, hastened to the scene and, because the Chicago photographic fraternity had been to a man wiped out, was almost in sole possession of the ruins as they still smoldered. The trip back to Detroit over the Michigan Central was so rough that more than half of his precious plates were shattered in the baggage car.
Upon another occasion a railroad locomotive irrefutably confirmed the metaphysical hypothesis that things hate people when a steam engine of the Denver & Rio Grande WestRailroad exploded as it passed through Palmer Lake, instantly killing a railroad aficiowaiting at the trackside to take its photograph as it passed. Such dramatic examples of the latent hostility of inanimate objects are fortunately infrequent.
For many years the almost unbelievably valuable collection of builder's photographs of the Pullman Company dating from 1893 to the end of its era as a car builder lay neglected in a loft building barely protected from the elements in Pullman town south of Chicago. Carejammed into huge packing cases and available to the seasonal extremes of heat and cold peculiar to Lake Michigan which caused havoc to their thin and sensitive coating of emul, they were about to be sold for junk when the company razed its historic erection shops. Only the intervention of an informed collector who alerted the directors of the company to this impending tragedy was instrumental in preserving for posterity this incomparable heriof pictures.
The melancholy tally of tragedies involving the photographic annals of railroading can be endlessly attenuated and the practitioner in the field who cannot add a footnote to it is rare indeed.
Indifference and neglect compounded by the perishable nature of the medium involved have, beyond all doubting, deprived posterity of a lamentably long list of now vanished and, indeed, unrecorded but once latent images on glass plates and half-plates.
A silver bromide lining, if there is one, to these cloudy reflections Is that a photomissing from the archives enhances the value of those that have survived and, like the Sibylline Books, the fewer there are available, the more valuable they become.
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