Steam & Excursion > UP Challenger 3988, Mystery Location

Here is a photo by Emil Albrecht, showing UP 4-6-6-4 3988 at a location myself and others can not identify. Likely Laramie, but maybe not.

Where is this photo taken?

The image itself is a beautiful 16 by 20 print made by Emil himself, and comes to me as part of the Dean Gray collection. I made this digital image using a copy stand and my Nikon D5300 24MP DSLR. After cropping, the final image is 5349x3865 (20.6MP), and 300 ppi as a final resolution. Lighting is sixteen daylight CFL bulbs, ganged in four sets of four.

Don Strack  

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Spend a few minutes on Google Maps in Laramie.  I believe that the white house, the one behind the church still stands.  I traveled the roads behind the yard (west side of the Laramie yard) this morning in street view.  I believe that this photo is Laramie.  There are a number of tell tales that I see.   1.) The snowy range in the back ground and the quick end of the snowy range on the south side of the photo.  2.)  The locomotive is clearly sitting north south based on the shadows shown on the locomotive.  3.)  If you look closely at the background, you see a small bridge.  There is indeed a river that runs north south on the west side of the yard in Laramie.  The street block sizes are nearly identical to how the streets are aligned even today in Laramie.   The old roundhouse and shop facility would have been just north of this location and as you look at the locomotive, it has a full load of coal and we would assume that the crew is approaching the locomotive.  This may have been a facility hostling crew to move the locomotive.  Note, no chokes or chains under the drivers or any wheels, the locomotive is clearly in transit.   4.) Challengers were often assigned helper service and it was not uncommon for helpers to run all the way through to Laramie from Cheyenne, be turned and then sent back to Cheyenne.  Based on the boiler jacket, the time of year and how dirty the locomotive is, I project this as a late steam era summer rush helper photo.

 

Here's a photo I took of 4014 from the pedestrian footbridge in Laramie in May 2014. In the upper left of mine, you can see the same buildings WRRC was talking about above 3988: the church, the white house behind it, and the square brown house. On the very right of mine, you can see a road bridge. My guess is that's where the photo of 3988 was taken, in the morning.
~wko

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Based on this photo, my location is a little off.  My guess was that the 3988 photo was SOUTH of the servicing facility.  In reality, it would have been North of the facility, with the tender facing the facility, the nose of the locomotive facing north.

See the SD40-2 in the back of the Big Boy picture, that is closer to where the 3988 was sitting in the photo.   This being true, the 3988 had just come from under the coaling tower and was most likely sitting as a "ready outbound" .....or, was serviced, moved and now needs to be turned to head south (or railroad east).   The Big Boy is sitting in this photo pointed due south (railroad east).  The 3988 is sitting facing due north (railroad west).

The church, on Google maps can be seen at the corner of Pine and W. Ivenson in Laramie.   The old roundhouse and the coaling tower were located just off of Custer.  You can see the smoke stack from the heating/cleaning boilers of the roundhouse still standing.  The 3988 photo is Laramie, near Ivenson St.

>  4.) Challengers were often assigned helper service and it was not uncommon for helpers
> to run all the way through to Laramie from Cheyenne, be turned and then sent back to
> Cheyenne.  Based on the boiler jacket, the time of year and how dirty the locomotive is, I project
> this as a late steam era summer rush helper photo.

Hello,

From what I've found, in this era the 4-6-6-4s were most often used in the Laramie - Green River territory.  Many of them were assigned to that pool (which technically extended east to Cheyenne) from the late '40s through the end of steam power in the mid/late '50s.  In the early years of that timeframe the 4-6-6-4s worked the pool with the 9000s; in later years, with the 4000s.  It's possible the locomotive was working in helper service but in the late '40s/'50s helpers were not often found in Laramie, especially after they stopped using them regularly on Sherman Hill in 1953.  I'll guess that the locomotive is serviced & ready to head west toward Green River; perhaps we're seeing the engineer & fireman or herder about to climb on. 

Take care,

Mark 

Thanks for the replies. Emil sold his negatives in the mid 1980s, and I asked the person who now owns most of them. He replied that the photo of UP 3988 was taken at Laramie on August 25, 1956.

I figured it was taken in Laramie, but I asked here on TO mainly to get a discussion going. Mark Amfahr's reply provided some nice context for the photo, rather than simply being a pretty picture. I am a bit curious as to what Emil was standing on to get such a high view.

As a side note, I also kind of wanted to show off my new process for producing digital images of material that is too large to fit on a scanner.

Don Strack

Think that's a fence along the yard in
the first pic? Why did UP need that?

Church is at 41.3122N 105.5993W,
three blocks south of the overpass.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/16 15:53 by timz.

timz Wrote:
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> Think that's a fence along the yard in
> the first pic? Why did UP need that?
>
> Church is at 41.3122N 105.5993W,
> three blocks south of the overpass.

Walkway is still there.

Don,

Being that one of your inetentions was to show off the technology, I need to say.....WOW......awesome.  I hope you have a ton more of these that you will be posting.  These two that you did today are incredible and I hope to see them in a future book of yours.....maybe a book like your Ogden Book, but about Laramie?  I'll pre-pay my copy!   By the way, your Ogden book is being used on the Wasatch Union Pacific which is an N scale model (in part) of the Ogden Servicing facility.  Page 95 of your Ogden book is the primary inspiriation of our Ogden servicing facility.  Love your work!!!!    

Thanks for the kind words, but I doubt that another book is in my future. I have found that doing web pages is a lot more versatile, and not as restrictive. Both types of media are equally temporary, especially with the lack of promotion that railfan publications receive. It is a shrinking market, and it is only getting smaller.

Have you seen the 990+ photos of Union Pacific steam locomotives in this online photo album?

https://donstrack.smugmug.com/UtahRails/Union-Pacific/UP-Steam-DDR/

The "DDR" is an acronym for Dave, Dean and Ralph, whose collections were the sources for the photos. The total views for all of the photos in the album over the past 30 days stands at 32,900 views.

Don Strack

To think that Steve Lee & Co. had one of these beauties in full operation...seems unbelievable now.  One of the biggest steam engines ever, running in modern times.....now just sitting, dead cold.