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Chasing Trains by Robert W Richardson Lifetime story of Co RR Museum founder HC
Chasing Trains by Robert W Richardson
The lifetime story of the founder of the Colorado Railroad Museum
Hard Cover
432 pages
Copyright 2004
CONTENTS
Introduction 7 Why Chase Trains?
Chapter 1 13 Autobiographical Sketch of Robert W. Richardson
Chapter 2 17 Favorite Engines of Mine, etc.
Chapter 3 35 Northeastern States
Chapter 4 113 New England States
Chapter 5 119 The Vanishing Interurban
Chapter 6 127 Across Canada
Chapter 7 131 Old Border States and the Midwest
Chapter 8 157 The Southern States
Chapter 9 193 Texas and Oklahoma
Chapter 10 227 Mexico and Central America
Chapter 11 251 Persian Gulf Countries
Chapter 12 263 Colorado and New Mexico Before 1948
Chapter 13 269 Bob Richardson Comes to Colorado
Chapter 14 279 Why Move to Colorado?
Chapter 15 303 Chasing the San Juan
Chapter 16 313 Out in Colorado For Snow
Chapter 17 337 Poncha and Marshall Passes
Chapter 18 351 The Gunnison Country
Chapter 19 369 Ouray and the Rio Grande Southern
Chapter 20 387 My Favorite Railroad, etc.
Chapter 21 405 Assembling a Museum
Chapter 22 425 Preservation Experiences
INTRODUCTION
WHY "CHASE" TRAINS? Why put so much effort and time into photographing locomotives, interurbans and trains? The simplest answer would be from the obvious fact that most of us acquire a lifelong interest in some avocation that to others is a puzzle. Why we select a particular interest as a hobby is something that is indeed an enigma and baffling to explain.
With me I suppose it all began on Memorial Day of 1931, when I rode the final train on Ohio's last narrow-gauge railroad. Up to that date, I had always expressed a fascination with railroads, and I had spent many an hour (or day) just watching them. However, that day was different for I had taken the family Kodak camera along and used up an entire roll of film. Some of the resulting pictures were poor, but it really made little difference as the good ones were lost when I loaned the negatives to a man who never returned them.
The pictures in Railroad Magazine were fascinating, and I learned that many persons were taking photographs of engines and trains. For years, I had been keeping a scrapbook of pictures printed in newspapers. The engines and cars of the little Ohio River & Western narrow-gauge line went to scrap with few photographs snapped of this railroad's last days. To me, it seemed a great loss that those vignettes were forever lost, unrecorded.
So, armed with a folding Kodak 3A camera, I started taking pictures of railroad scenes. The infamous Great Depression was on, and there were few dollars available for film. My subjects were picked with care, and my travels were limited by that Depression. Even so, many a tank of gasoline-at 19 cents a gallon!-was wasted in the pursuit of elusive steam locomotives and electric interurbans!
Long trips during that decade were few. Visits to relatives in Pennsylvania provided some opportunities farther afield. But by the mid-1930's, a rare trip to Washington, D.C., another to the East Broad Top narrow-gauge line in 1936, and one that fall to Tennessee to see the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina (also narrow gauge) were outstanding events, increasing my growing collection of "railfan" photographs.
Four years spent working in Columbus, Ohio, at the end of the decade widened my field of subjects with the big motive power of that area. It was also the era of the fan trip coming into popularity. Regional fan trips consumed many rolls of film during long weekend outings. Ohio had few short lines. The large railroads seldom could be bothered with handling small groups in special movements. So, our trips were mostly on the rapidly vanishing interurban lines, and this included whatever steam power was in their vicinity.
With a low military draft number, I quit the editor's post at Linn's Weekly Stamp News early in 1941. With a similarly situated friend, we went on a last grand fling of railroading by going during the early summer on a trip to see the Colorado narrow-gauge railroads. However, the military changed their needs, and a change in age limits postponed the draft for a while.
Then came my really big chance to see railroads over a large part of the United States, an unexpected "perk" (in my view) of a temporary job with the Seiberling Rubber Company. With their sign truck I was to check with dealer outlets to locate and place indoor and outdoor advertising, making local arrangements, etc. Eventually, it took me over a good half of the U.S., and to my delight, this provided frequent opportunities to use my cameras while seeing some interesting and unusual lines. Up to that time, the company had difficulty keeping anyone on such a job, as it involved layovers at out-of-the-way places. There was nothing to interest the average young fellow, and the stays were so short as to preclude making local acquaintances.
My bosses puzzled at receiving none of the usual complaints from me and checked up by means of the salesmen and branch managers "...to see what he's up to." (Incidentally, I wish I had some of those reports to include here!) My boss called me in to his office to order that I put the cost of train trips and film on expense reports. He hated traveling and commented, "It's our fault you have to go to such out-of-the-way places and put up with those awful accommodations."
So, I included the trip costs on the reports, but not the cost for film for fear some auditor might want them. During the conversation, my boss asked where it was that I had breakfast on a streetcar. That puzzled me, until I found that the office girls, in nosily checking my reports, had somehow con-fused the electric Illinois Terminal Railroad with a streetcar line. And while I was riding an ITR train I had breakfast one snowy morning in their parlor-caftrailer while en route to St. Louis.
To tease these snoopers, on several occasions on mixed-train trips I would have the conductor cut me a cash fare for a few cents for passage from one obscure siding to another. The girls in vain tried to solve those expense entries, even with the aid of a boy friend in the shipping department who had a copy of the Official Guide. One conductor entered into the idea when I explained, with great enthusiasm, selecting from some old forms some places from which track had vanished.
As for an avid interest in railroads, my mother had uncles who worked on the Pennsylvania Railroad as a baggageman, trainman and yardmaster. My father grew up in Corning, New York, and as a kid he watched the goings and comings of Erie, Lackawanna and New York Central trains. His Sunday walks with me as a small child in Akron, Ohio, could always be counted upon to include the Union Station, occasionally a roundhouse or interurban terminal-just as today's parents take their kids to the airport by car (no walking). And a pigeon-racing club found out that I was just the one to escort a crate of birds to some station 50 or more miles distant, there to release the birds from the crate. The club paid my train or interurban fares and gave me a dollar or two extra. During later years, some relatives of mine would wonder, "How did he get so interested in trains?"
My intended railroad career was short, as was my bout with higher education. After graduating from high school at 16 to go to work in the Akron, Canton & Youngstown's roundhouse, my parents signature was needed, but was refused. So, I was pushed to register at Akron University. However, I never attended a class, and I went to work for a wholesale hardware company instead.
Mainline hotshot trains were not as great an attraction to me as the short lines, particularly the ones that were small and obscure. The outfits with minimal listing in the Official Guide were often very interesting, well worth the effort to find and explore. Their people, too, were more friendly and tolerant of picture-taking than were the employees of the big roads. The little lines and weedy branches were often barely escaping the scrap heap. It was sad to realize that their days were numbered. Their comings and goings were seldom, if ever, recorded on film. I used to think of all their impressive action lost forever, their notch in time having vanished with the smoke. Small motive power and cars with fading, peeling lettering were things I delighted to find and photograph. When I sold my golf set one rainy, discouraging summer, I kept one iron just for swishing weeds obscuring forgotten rolling stock!
An incentive with all this was to exchange photographs with other railfans. Often these developed into longtime correspondence, exchanging information from distant points I would never get to. We generally did not take our photographs with any thought of their ever being published, particularly in a book. There were not any railroad books being published then, so the sole rare picture to be published might be one used in Railroad or Trains magazines.
Sometimes, with a borrowed Keystone camera, I took 16-mm movies, but not extensively. A roll of film cost $5.00 for just a few minutes. Not much of that could be afforded during the Depression. (With awe, I have watched the video cameras being used for pan shots that far exceed what one 100-foot roll of 16-mm film could do, and all for the cost of a few cents.)
Color slides were added to my outings around 1950, after I selected a 120-size camera and chose Agfa, Ansco and Koda-chrome color films to get large 21/4 x 2'/4-inch slides. The slides were beautiful and could be projected on a full movie screen. On some days I shot only color slides-no black-and-white at all-something I eventually bitterly regretted. For a few years later, disaster struck, when it was discovered that all those color slides were turning into awful reds and browns. It sadly turned out that Agfa, Ansco and Kodachrome color slides were not permanent films.
During 1962 I switched to a 35-mm camera, a Leica, and routinely asked various Leica fans what that camera's idiosyncrasies were, only to be informed that there were none. Shortly thereafter, I went on a trip to Mexico to shoot railroad pictures. I had permits to photograph the engine terminals that were soon to be dieselized and shot over 30 rolls of film. When this film was developed, some 32 rolls looked like dirty window panes-over 1,000 slides ruined! It turned out that the Leica did have a peculiarity, for it occasionally got a small piece of film stuck in the shutter! The Leica almost got thrown into Clear Creek, averted only by a cash offer from an employee, who got a bargain on the promise to keep the camera out of my sight. Since then. I have enjoyed years of reliable use from two Pentax cameras.
At first, the tendency was to take shots at a three-quarter angle, but it was soon realized that made for a monotonous collection. As a result, this was expanded to scenes of trains, general views of the lines, stations, depots and types of cars, especially cabooses. Considerable effort was made to shoot bridge-and-trestle scenes. And snow scenes I particularly tried hard to get. Only after the legendary Rio Grande Southern narrow-gauge line was abandoned did I realize that virtually no one ventured to visit such remote lines during the winter. And I have regretted very much that I did not make a better effort to cover this line and others like it during the winter months. Of course, one big deterrent was the lack of good all-weather highways in those days, and one venture out along the RGS west of Durango ended with my vehicle in the borrow pit. Fortunately, a couple of ranchers soon retrieved the pickup truck from its embarrassing position.
While in Texas, I tried using at least some action scenes with both a 16-mm movie camera and the "616" for still shots. I did not see the movie results until I was back in Akron, and never again tried such dual shooting. The movies were exasperating to watch, for just as the train became really interesting, the scene "cut"! Another "booboo" was taking the advice of a camera-store clerk to use a red filter to bring out the clouds. It certainly did that, but the trains were just black silhouettes!
In 60 years of photographic activity, it should be clear that I have taken as many duds as anyone else, and have had disasters to equal others. Like the time the developer ruined most of my film taken on the ET&WNC back in 1936, for example. I am just grateful that most of the time the camera just "grabbed" what was hoped for. It is humbling to think of the several thousand ruined color slides and all the wasted trips, as well as days of efforts that came to nothing. However, there were far more days that turned out to be all right. Above all, I kept in mind that it was only a hobby, not a matter of life and death, so I seldom found myself being grimly serious in the pursuit. And I could even laugh at my own mistakes and what were sometimes wretched results. Things like racing in the car, then puffing up a hillside to snap an oncoming Baltimore & Ohio articulated engine, with a tall column of smoke rising high in the sky -a great shot, but no film in the camera! Or after a long wait, finding an oncoming Louisiana & Arkansas 4-6-0 smokily chuffing along with its wooden train, and then, as the shutter clicked, the shutter fell apart!
Still... nearly all of it was fun, and some latter-day satisfaction comes from seeing the photographic successes giving pleasure to others by appearing in railroad books.
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