In August of 1957, photographer J. Parker Lamb captured this view of the Willis Shortline Railroad’s #200 steam locomotive hauling a string of gondolas at a sand and gravel pit.
“The Willis Shortline Railroad Co. served a sand and gravel pit owned by Jerry Willis at Enon, in Washington Parish, Louisiana and was located along the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio’s Bogue Chitto District. This 4-6-0 was built by Baldwin in August 1889 as Texas & Pacific class D-5 number 200. It was sold to the Cinclare Central Plantation at Brusly, in West Baton Rouge Parish, where it was used to haul sugar cane trains over the T&P’s Port Allen Branch. Cinclare replaced the 200 with a used 44-ton General Electric center-cab diesel-electric loco, and the Ten Wheeler was sold to the Willis Shortline in 1955. It was last used around 1963 and subsequently scrapped.” -Mike Palmieri
I was lucky to see this old locomotive as a 17 year old kid back in the summer of 1965. I was on a railfanning expedition with a few members of the Crescent City Model Railroad Club, serving that day as the driver for Lou Schultz, Andy Sperandeo and Rick Boutall. This gravel pit was the last stop in our journey which also included stops in Bogalusa at the Crown Zellerbach mill to see their old interurban car hauling paper rolls around the plant, and a visit to the Standard Gravel Co. pit near Franklinton. What a day that was!
Proof that I was there! 🙂
Top image by J. Parker Lamb; collection of Michael Palmieri. Bottom image by Andy Sperandeo.
In the year 1936, A.E. Brown recorded this view of Texas & Pacific locomotive #331 as she was running extra with a short freight. The location is east of the Cedar Grove tower located in Louisiana. Looking at the 1948 railroad Atlas, I see that the T&P crossed both the Southern Pacific and the Kansas City Southern in a place called Cedar Grove. This is now within the greater Shreveport area. I’m speculating that the tower was likely at one of those crossings.
I really like this scene, both the little train itself, and the countryside where it’s running. This is the flavor that I’m hoping to capture on my Louisiana Central model railroad pike that is presently under construction.
The #331 is a 4-6-0 “ten-wheeler” and she is an oil-burning, Class D-9 built by A.L. Cooke in May of 1903. She ran with a 200 psi boiler pressure feeding her 20″x26″ cylinders, those powering the 63″ drivers. She had a tractive effort of 28,000 lbs. I’ve seen photos of several of her sisters that had been out-shopped at some point, receiving piston valve cylinders and new outside valve gear. Some had their headlight location moved to the center of the smokebox door. I can’t say whether the #331 received that upgrade in its later years.
This photograph is part of the Louis Saillard collection that is being uploaded to the flickr website by Tony Howe.
A railroad caboose, in my view, is perhaps the most interesting of railway cars. In the “golden era” of railroading, the caboose had become a crew’s home away from home. It was common for a conductor to be assigned a particular caboose that became “his” caboose. And many of those conductors (perhaps aided by their brakemen) began to customize their hack to their liking. They might add things that added to their comfort, or perhaps things to make their job easier and more efficient. And many also added things to make the traveling home more like home. Today’s photograph shows a sample that includes all of these things.
The scene is the interior of Southern Pacific #684, a class C-30-1 caboose. Seated at the desk is conductor Charles Martin, busy with his paperwork. And the gentleman has done a number of things to aid his work, and increase his comfort. The Venetian blinds will certainly aid in keeping the glare from his eyes as he works. And the lamps aren’t likely to be railroad issue. Most obviously is his chair. I’m quite sure it’s also not railroad issue, with its nice, thick cushions. Note the glass telegraph insulators on the leg tips. I had never seen a detail like that, and I first thought perhaps they were to help keep the chair from sliding. So I searched for an answer and found two. A lot of folks say this was commonplace on telegrapher’s chairs; that it protected them from electrical shock if a bolt of lightning hit the telegraph lines while the agent had his hand on the key. A few others claimed that these glass insulators made the chair slide much easier on rough wooden floors (exactly opposite of my speculation). I’m prone to buy into the latter explanation since the conductor doesn’t have a telegrapher’s key. You know better? . . . then please share with us!
When I saw this image I thought it might be from photographer Jack Delano, who had a similar “style” in his photography. But this image was recorded by Stan Kistler. The photo is undated, but I believe it to be in the 1950s. I’ve heard Mr. Kistler’s name before, and I’m encouraged to look further into his work as I’m liking what I’m seeing here.
No, I’m not talking rail ferries. Rather, the shipment of boats on the railroads. During World War II an entrepreneur by the name of Andrew Jackson Higgins designed and built over 20,000 boats and small ships for the U.S. Navy. He originally had a small boat building company in New Orleans, Louisiana used to build boats for his lumber exporting business. At the onset of WWII this expanded into five huge boat building plants. One was in Houma, Louisiana, the rest in New Orleans. One of those four plants was located on City Park Avenue, just several blocks from the home I was raised in.
The largest number of the boats he produced were the model LCVP ramp boats, often referred to as Higgins Boats. These were the ones that were able to get in close to beaches, then drop a large ramp at the front for the Marines and the Army troops to storm out of. The other boats that gained attention were the PT (patrol torpedo) boats that Higgins produced for the Navy. While not as numerous as the Elco built boats, they were still vital in their mission. And there were several other boats and small ships that Higgins built, mostly unknown to the general public in the general sense.
So what does this have to do with railroads? Railroads were essential for the transportation of these boats. Only one of the boat building plants had direct access to a waterway. The others (including the one on City Park Avenue) had to transport each boat to Bayou St. John, and then travel down that waterway to Lake Pontchartrain for testing. There was a rail line directly next to the City Park plant, so boats there were shipped to Bayou St. John by both truck and rail. After testing, boats would be loaded on railcars for shipment across the country for delivery to the military services.
Higgins LCVP ramp boats being loaded onto railcars at Bayou St. John in New Orleans, Louisiana for shipment to the U.S. Navy. Photo taken in early 1940s during WWII.New Orleans, Louisiana: A Higgins PT boat exits the City Park plant via railroad transport to nearby Bayou St. John east of the plant for its water testing. At 78 feet in length, the boat takes multiple cars to handle it; note the idler car in front of the overhanging bow. The boat is also well over the normal width and height limits so that the car’s routing will be carefully planned to clear obstructions along the way. Photo taken in early 1940s during WWII.
I visited a number of websites that covered the topic of the Higgins operation. One of the most interesting sites was The American Automobile Industry in World War Two, An American Auto Industry Heritage Tribute by David D Jackson. Both of these images can be found on those pages. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a photo credit for these images on any of the websites that I visited.
The late Louis Saillard had visited the Gloster Southern Railroad during its tenure operating on the line between Columbia and Silver Creek, both located in Mississippi. In October of 1989 he captured this view of the line’s sole locomotive and its train as it crossed the trestle at Silver Creek. Ralph Hawkins has a nice write-up about this operation on his website HawkinsRails, and I borrowed extensively for this post from the same.
This is the introduction to Ralph’s article: “Columbia Route operations . . . From November 1988 to December 1995, the Gloster Southern operated the 29 mile line from Silver Creek to Columbia, Mississippi. Dubbed the “Columbia Route” by Georgia Pacific, the line was originally built by the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad just after the turn of the century. After the Illinois Central Gulf sold the line in 1982, it was operated by the Columbia & Silver Creek Railroad until 1988, when the GLSR took control.”
Note the Columbia Route lettering on the locomotive. She’s an EMD model SW900 switcher producing 900 HP. She was built for the Hammond Redwood Lumber Co. in September of 1959. Having changed ownership several times, she finally arrived on the Gloster Southern.
For this first posting in the month of December, I’m featuring a photograph from the 1986 calendar published by the Louisiana State Railroad Museum, it being for their month of December. The caption for the image follows below.
“It is May, 1947, and the GM&O’s “Little” Rebel is ready for her trip north from the Southern Railway’s New Orleans, Louisiana, Basin Street Station. When the new Union Passenger Terminal was completed in 1954, the GM&O decided not to follow across town and dropped the New Orleans terminus. (Photo from the collection of Harold K. Vollrath.)”
The Rebel was introduced by the Gulf, Mobile and Northern Railroad in 1935, running between New Orleans, Louisiana and Jackson, Tennessee. The two train sets were produced by American Car and Foundry and were powered by a unique “power car” unit consisting of the cab and engine compartment, an RPO compartment and a baggage compartment. It was equipped with a 600 hp, six-cylinder McIntosh & Seymour 531 prime mover and Westinghouse electric transmission components. It hauled both buffet-coach and sleeper-observation cars in different numbers during portions of its route.
By 1940 the GM&N had been merged into what became the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Sometime after that, it upgraded its passenger service with full-sized cars on the St. Louis-Mobile Gulf Coast Rebel, pulled by new Alco DL-109 locomotives. The original Rebel continued in service, but was now commonly known as the “Little Rebel”.
The train shown here is led by power car #354, the third unit received in 1937. By 1947 the train had been repainted from it’s original silver and crimson colors into the GM&O (former Alton Railroad colors) red and maroon with gold trim.
Back in the summer of the year 2000, I took a trip west to Colorado and New Mexico. There, I spent a day on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad taking the excursion ride between Chama, New Mexico and Antonito, Colorado. I’d taken this journey some years before, and enjoyed it enough then to repeat the journey again.
Traveling through the mountains, I captured this view of the fireman hanging out of the locomotive’s gangway perhaps getting a breath of fresh, cooler air during his break as the train was drifting down a grade. I liked the mountain peak in the distance, which emphasized the enormity of the terrain compared to the little train.
With tomorrow being Thanksgiving day, I remembered this photograph that I’d posted a couple years ago. I had come across this image of a Cass Scenic Railroad train headed up by one of their Shay locomotives. This is in West Virginia and I can’t think of a better railroading scene to represent the fall season and our time of Thanksgiving here in the United States of America. This photograph was taken by Mr. Walter Scriptunas II. The date is unknown to me, but the scene is timeless.
In May of 1996 Ron Findley and I spent the day traveling through southern Mississippi to check out the state of railroading up there. And “up there” is in the context that both of us are from south Louisiana, in the lower part of the “boot”. 🙂
Naturally while in Vicksburg, which is located on the Mississippi River, we headed for the yard there. This was a bit over two years since the MidSouth Rail Corporation’s railroad had been absorbed into the Kansas City Southern. There we found a mix of both MidSouth and KCS locomotives parked in the service area.
I had first toured that yard in the early 70s when the facility was under Illinois Central Gulf rule. And the ICG wasn’t the first to utilize the yard in the years before. And over the years it never disappointed in the variety of locomotives, cars and cabooses (the latter in the earlier years). I’m unsure of the yard’s status now in 2025.
In the spring of last year I posted several photographs taken by the late Ron Findley during our trips to the Southern Forest Heritage Museum up in Long Leaf, Louisiana. Our first trip occurred in March of 1988 when we discovered the former sawmill property. And the first thing we encountered was a “boneyard” filled with steam locomotive debris. It was obviously where locomotives, and perhaps other equipment, were being cut up for scrap. For some reason the scrappers stopped before dismantling a steam locomotive and a Clyde double-ended rehaul skidder. And they had left considerable debris from the process, which was a surprise. Why did they stop and not complete the job, and haul off all of that metal?
I lost the slides I had made during that initial trip as a result of the Great Flood of 2016. Fortunately Ron still had his, and I’ve posted some photographs that Ron had recorded of the #400 steam locomotive and of the Clyde skidder at different times. In April of 2011 Ron and I had gone back to the sawmill (now the SFHM) to see the entire property. But I had forgotten that I had then taken digital images, thinking I was still using the film camera. I recently found the file containing those images. The photograph below is one that I took of both machines together. One can see a few scraps from other locomotives, and these are at the very edge of the boneyard. There is quite a bit more behind me.
The Union Pacific’s crowning glory was their massive 4-8-8-4 locomotive, known as the Big Boy. Twenty-five in number, they are indeed massive. I’ve been fortunate over the years to see a few of them; the ones on display in St. Louis and in Dallas (the latter now in Frisco). And I was very fortunate to see the restored #4014 a few years ago when she made her trip to New Orleans. I caught her on the move for three days in a row, and it was a sight to behold.
But it’s hard to imagine just how big these machines are when simply looking at a photograph. Well the image below helps with that. And what makes this image different is the crew member (likely the engineer) standing on the ground by the beast. Now you can see how much this locomotive towers over man!
Unfortunately, though I’ve seen versions of this photograph many times, I’ve never seen one that credits the photographer. I’ve wondered if it was perhaps a company image which often go without credits.
For this first posting in the month of November, I’m featuring a photograph from the 1986 calendar published by the Louisiana State Railroad Museum, it being for their month of November. The caption for the image follows below.
“Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the August heat of 1932 is heavy in the air. A 1906 Baldwin built with slope backed tender, Louisiana & Arkansas #80 was originally built for L&A predecessor Louisiana Railway & Navigation Company. Note the “summerized” engineer’s cab window! (Photo from the collection of Harold K. Vollrath)”
I generally do research on locomotives that I post photographs of. And this is one that I drew a total blank on. I wasn’t able to find a single iota of additional information, or even other photographs of this steamer. It’s obviously an 0-8-0 switcher with a sloped back tender, she appears to be an oil burner, and that’s about it. And I’m curious about that “summerized” cab window that is in the photo’s caption. Even blowing up the image, I can’t figure out what the author means. I’m assuming the window was a three-piece design, with the forward section fixed, the remaining two designed to slide behind the first to give the opening. It appears that one of the slide sections is missing. As for “summerized”, I think the best use for that concocted word would be for the canvas sun shade over the window.
I also suspect that this locomotive is in a dead line. I’m not seeing any signs of grease and oil anywhere on the valve gear and piston rod. Nor any brightness on the driver tires or tender truck wheels.
If any reader has more information about this locomotive (and especially about that window :-), then please post a comment.
