Climbing the Hill at Top Speed

On August 20, 1977, Number 610 hiked up the grade at Bristow, Virginia at 50 miles per hour. Ronald N. Johnson was there to capture the picture on the front of this post card.

The 2-10-4 “Selkirk” was built by Lima Locomotive Works in 1927. This particular locomotive is a former Texas & Pacific locomotive on lease to the Southern Railway. The Texas & Pacific Railroad was granted a federal charter in 1871 to operate a railroad via the most direct and eligible route along the 32nd Parallel from Marshall, Texas to El Paso, Texas and on to San Diego, California. It merged with the Missouri Pacific Railroad in 1976. The following two websites provided the information below about the Southern Railway: http://www.srha.net/public/History/history.htm https://www.american-rails.com/southern.html One of America's great transportation companies was the Southern Railway. Southern Railway is the product of nearly 150 predecessor lines that were combined, reorganized and recombined since the 1830s. The nine-mile South Carolina Canal & Rail Road Co., Southern's earliest predecessor line, was chartered in December 1827 and ran the nation's first scheduled passenger service to be pulled regularly by a steam locomotive -- the wood-burning "Best Friend of Charleston" -- out of Charleston, S.C., on Christmas Day 1830. When its 136-mile line to Hamburg, S.C. was completed in October 1833, it was the longest continuous line of railroad in the world. Southern Railway was created in 1894, largely from the financially-stressed Richmond & Danville system and the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia Railroad. The company owned two-thirds of the 4,400 miles of line it operated, and the rest was held through leases, operating agreements and stock ownership. Southern also subsequently controlled the Queen & Crescent Route (Alabama Great Southern; New Orleans & Northeastern; Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific; and for a time the Alabama & Vicksburg), and the Georgia Southern & Florida, which were operated separately. By the time the New Orleans & Northeastern (Meridian-New Orleans) was acquired in 1916 under Southern's president Fairfax Harrison, the railroad had attained the 8,000-mile, 13-state system that marked its territorial limits for almost half a century. In 1953, Southern Railway became the first major railroad in the United States to convert totally to diesel-powered locomotives, ending its rich history in the golden age of steam. When CSX was formed in 1980 Southern and Norfolk & Western realized they must merge to remain competitive, completing the union in 1982. Today, much of the Southern remains an important component under Norfolk Southern.

The post card was published by the Audio-Visual Designs out of Earlton, New York after 1963. I know it is after that year because the company address includes the five-digit zip code. This is one of 333 post cards in my collection published by Audio-Visual Designs.

Ten Wheels. Count Them. Ten Wheels

The picture on the front of this post card shows a steam locomotive with ten wheels; there are four on the pilot and six driving wheels. The Whyte Classification of steam locomotives categorizes locomotives by the wheel arrangements and gives them a "nick name". For example, a 2-6-2 wheel arrangement is also called a "Prairie" locomotive; or, the 4-10-0 is called a "Mastodon".

The locomotive in this picture is a 4-6-0 or a "Ten Wheeler". Not very imaginative. This website (a treasure trove of knowledge) tells us the following about Ten Wheelers. https://www.american-rails.com/wheeler.html Like the Consolidation, the 4-6-0 "Ten-wheeler" was another steam locomotive design that helped to displace the common American. The Ten-wheeler is perhaps the only design to derive its name simply from the number of wheels it carries (ten) with a 4-6-0 arrangement. The 4-6-0 was developed as early as the late 1840s first appearing on the Philadelphia & Reading. Their creation came about because of a need to increase adhesion, which allowed a single locomotive to haul heavier loads. Essentially an American design, the Ten-wheeler’s extra axle allowed for this increase in tractive effort. For the first times in the railroad industry’s short history it now had a specialized locomotive that could be used for specific purposes, in this case hauling freight and passengers over steep grades. As trains became heavier the 4-6-0 ran into the same problem of all models which lacked a trailing axle or truck; without the added support for a larger firebox and a small frame of just three driving axles limiting boiler size the locomotive, eventually, could simply not keep up with the times. The locomotive on the front of this post card belonged to the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad. On January 4th of this year I published this about the Rock Island Line. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chicago-Rock-Island-and-Pacific-Railroad-Company tells us that... The Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad Company, its official name, was also known as the Rock Island Railroad, or The Rock. It was a U.S. railroad company founded on February 27, 1847 as the Rock Island and La Salle Railroad Company to build a line from Rock Island to La Salle, Illinois. Construction began in earnest on October 1, 1851 after the first $300,000 was raised. The first train ran on the tracks on October 10, 1852 between Chicago and Joliet, Illinois. Construction continued on through La Salle, and Rock Island was reached on February 22, 1854. This made it the first railroad to connect Chicago with the Mississippi River. By 1866 its lines extended from Chicago, Illinois to Council Bluffs, Iowa. Management in the late 19th century was extremely conservative, but new interests took over in 1901. By 1907 the line attained its peak length of 14,270 miles (22,975 kilometres) in 13 states, but this rapid expansion impaired its credit and it was reorganized in 1917 and again in 1947. In the 1960s the Rock Island again began to decline. Merger discussions with other railroads failed, and it began bankruptcy proceedings in March 1975. Federal loan guarantees kept it running, but in January 1980 a federal judge ordered the railroad liquidated on the grounds that there was no way of reorganizing it for profitable operation. Its properties were sold off piecemeal in the early 1980s.

The post card was published by Bob Fremming out of Dallas, Wisconsin. This is the fifth post card I am posting that he published. I still cannot find much information about him on line, but he was a prolific publisher. There are samples of his cards on line at Etsy, Ebay, and other auction sites.

These are Handsome Falls in Great Falls

This is a picture of a steam train traversing a bridge that crosses the Missouri River in Montana. The water falls is known today as Rainbow Falls.

However, their original name was Handsome Falls, named by none other than the explorers Lewis and Clarke. The train on the bridge belonged to the Montana Central Railway. It was a railway company which operated in the American state of Montana from 1886 to 1907. It was constructed by James Jerome Hill's St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway, and became part of the Great Northern Railway in 1889. James Jerome Hill, primary stockholder and president of the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway (StPM&M), established the Montana Central Railway on January 25, 1886. Few railroads served Montana at that time. But Butte, Montana, was a booming mining town that needed to get its metals to market; gold and silver had been discovered near Helena, Montana; and coal companies in Canada were eager to get their fuel to Montana's smelters. On September 18, 1889, Hill changed the name of the Minneapolis and St. Cloud Railway (a railroad which existed primarily on paper, but which held very extensive land grants throughout the Pacific Northwest) to the Great Northern Railway. On February 1, 1890, he transferred ownership of the StPM&M, Montana Central, and other rail systems he owned to the Great Northern. For a while the subsidiary railroads still ran under their own names. The Montana Central Railway stopped that in 1907. From the National Park Service website: On June 14, 1805, as Lewis explored the Great Falls of the Missouri River, he encountered “one of the most beatifull objects in nature, a cascade of about fifty feet perpendicular streching at right angles across the river from side to side to the distance of at least a quarter of a mile. here the river pitches over a shelving rock, with an edge as regular and as streight as if formed by art, without a nich or brake in it; the water descends in one even and uninterupted sheet to the bottom wher dashing against the rocky bottom rises into foaming billows of great hight and rappidly glides away, hising flashing and sparkling as it departs the sprey rises from one extremity to the other to 50 f. I now thought that if a skillfull painter had been asked to make a beautifull cascade that he would most probably have pesented the precise immage of this one.” Accordingly, Lewis and Clark named this landmark waterfall “Handsome Falls.”

The picture on the front of the post card was taken in 1902. Today, there is a hydroelectric dam between the bridge and water falls. The post card was printed, and probably published, by Heyn's Elite Studio at 10 – 5th Street North, Great Falls, Montana. They were regular advertisers in the Great Falls Tribune newspaper. The Bulletin of Photography (1916) reported that “Louis Heyn of the Elite Studio sold an interest in his business” to employee Harry J. Keeley.

The Louisville & Nashville in Florida?

If one takes out a magnifying glass and focuses on the dark line that forms

the top of the tender in this picture, one can see the letters “L & N”. They are the reporting mark of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. The American Rails website gives us a glimpse into the history of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad (The Dixie Line). This website is full of historic information about many railroads. I have taken the information below from them: https://www.american-rails.com/nashville.html The Louisville and Nashville Railroad served the heart of the Southeast from New Orleans and Memphis to Atlanta and the Florida Panhandle. the Louisville & Nashville Railroad was created on March 5, 1850 when the state of Kentucky issued a charter for the company "...to build a railroad between Louisville, Kentucky, and the Tennessee state line in the direction of Nashville." The L&N's first segment officially opened on August 25, 1855 and work proceeded quickly to push rails southward towards Tennessee. After four years of additional labor the railroad's charter was completed when it opened to Nashville on October 27, 1859. In 1881, it finally reached New Orleans via Mobile, Alabama via the Montgomery & Mobile and New Orleans, Mobile & Texas. Two years later, in 1883, it opened a 170-mile corridor from Pensacola to Chattahoochee, Florida, its furthest reach into Florida. It is this location to which the inscription on the smoke stack in the picture on the post card refers. “Pensacola, Florida Feb 1911” It also extended to St. Louis and later reached Chicago. The L&N carries precedence as one of the few to maintain its originally chartered name, operating for more than 120 years as the Louisville & Nashville.

This post card is what we consider to be a “Real Photo” post card. The person took the photo then printed it on special paper. This particular post card was printed on AZO paper. Where the stamp goes has the corporate name plus, each corner has a diamond in it. The placement of these diamonds tells us that the post card was printed between 1907 and 1909.

Push-me, Pull-you

Turn the calendar back to November 8, 1954, go down to the river bank at

Paxinos, Pennsylvania, and watch Pennsylvania Railroad’s train S-390 go by. In this picture the train is being pulled by Baldwin-built Decapod 4644. It is pulling 119 cars and two more Decapods (numbers 4629 and 4639) are pushing them. Paxinos is Northumberland County, Pennsylvania about the middle of the eastern third of state. Paxinos, founded in 1769, was named for a Shawanee Native American chief. The town is known in the area for its music store, which has a distinctive mural of a guitar player. You can see the mural in the circle on the cover of their facebook page. Today the Shamokin Valley Railroad has a station in Paxinos. This railroad has four interchanges with other railroads: Norfolk Southern Interchange, Canadian Pacific Interchange, the Reading Blue Mountain & Northern Interchange and the Lycoming Valley RR, North Shore RR, Union County Industrial RR Interchange. It also has four other train stations in Sunbury, Weigh Scales, Shamokin, and Carbon Run Pennsylvania.

The post card is published by Audio-Visual Designs in Earlton, New York. It was published after October of 1983 because the Zip Code contains the 5-digit plus 4-digit identification system. I have 333 post cards published by Audio-Visual Designs; by far, this is the largest group in my collection.