My good friend Ron Findley passed away back in January of this year (read this brief post of his passing). His wife Lourdes gifted me with Ron’s railroad slide collection. His images are stored in vinyl sheets contained in binders; they take up 5-1/2 feet of shelf space! I’ve not had very much time to go through them, but yesterday I leafed through one to get a feel for what he had. Early on I spotted the image below that he had taken while traveling on business and passing though Columbus, Mississippi.

Ron stopped at the Columbus & Greenville Railway facilities late in the evening of February 25, 1988, which was a Thursday. And there he recorded a view that most everyone that has visited the C&G has seen: their first diesel-electric locomotive on display in front of their shop building.

Locomotive #601 is a Baldwin model DRS 6-4-1500. She produces 1500 hp, and is carried on two A-1-A trucks (each with 3 axles, 2 with traction motors). One of five ordered, she was delivered to the C&G on October 8, 1946 and was evaluated for quality and performance. Having earned the confidence of management, they released the order for the other four units. All would be on the property and in operation by January of 1947.

There is an extended write up of these Baldwins on the HawkinsRails website, which I highly recommend (and gained much of this information from).

I’ll be featuring more of Ron’s photos as I find the time to sift through them. Ron and I made quite a few trips together over the years, primarily in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas. I lost virtually my entire slide collection in the Great Flood of 2016. I’m hoping to find “duplicates” of the images I had taken in Ron’s collection, as he and I took so many photographs while standing shoulder to shoulder. RIP Ron…