Steam & Excursion > Erupting volcanoes

Stephen J. Benkovitz (my father) took at least three pilgrimages down to Virginia in the late 1950’s to witness the twilight of mainline steam.  His theater of choice seemed to be the N&W mainline east of Roanoke, where Y6s could be seen in quantity doing what they do best – dragging and/or pushing loaded coal up and down the hills.
 
While performing their appointed task, the Y6s usually produced a prodigious amount of smoke and steam.  Here’s a couple of examples:
 
1. On June 7, 1958, Y6 #2142 belches huge clouds of ash and steam as she shoves a coal train eastbound at Bonsack VA.  NOTE:  I wish my father would have tilted the camera up a bit more to capture more of that glorious plume – alas, it seems twin-lens reflex cameras aren’t the easiest to frame on the fly!

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2.  On July 23, 1958, Y6a #2157 is performing the same task at Blue Ridge VA.  This one was nicely framed.

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3.  Someone asked on an earlier thread whether they can see how the ‘original’ scan looked before any color correction.  Here’s the first shot again (with the original cropping) – you can see it has shifted to the red.  This particular shot was typical of the 2.25x2.25 slides I had scanned – some were way worse, a few better

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Thanks for viewing!
 
Rob Benkovitz
West Palm Beach, Florida
 

WOW!!! those are spectacular!

Wowie Zowie! Some impressive! Thanks for posting...

Bob Phelps
Micanopy, FL

Look for the DVD by Herron called "Pillars Of Smoke In The Sky"....... It's all about the Blueridge Grade and massive steam. Best I have ever seen.
 

More great stuff, Rob!  A few of those old wooden N&W cabooses lasted long enough to get Pevler Blue paint and Hamburger Heralds.

mike woodruff
north platte ne

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I'm glad your dad was there to capture these images. 2-1/4 square negatives are really nice to work with, and yeah, that old Ektachrome did quickly turn red after a year or two.

 

swaool Wrote:
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> A few of those old wooden
> N&W cabooses lasted long enough to get Pevler Blue
> paint and Hamburger Heralds.

The phrase "hamburger helpers" can't help coming to mind.

Great stuff, and thanks for posting!

Mary McPherson
Dongola, IL
Diverging Clear Productions



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/27/25 13:09 by MaryMcPherson.

rbenko Wrote:
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NOTE:  I wish my
> father would have tilted the camera up a bit more
> to capture more of that glorious plume – alas,
> it seems twin-lens reflex cameras aren’t the
> easiest to frame on the fly!

Nice scans and PS work again brother.  I guess he didn't take a more distant shot of the helper.   Your note brought back memories of us kidding Dad that he'd leave too much sky in his early diesel shots because he was so used to photographing steam and getting in the smoke plume.

Bro, Stephen A. Benkovitz

swaool Wrote:
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> More great stuff, Rob!  A few of those old wooden
> N&W cabooses lasted long enough to get Pevler Blue
> paint and Hamburger Heralds.
>
> mike woodruff
> north platte ne

And plywood sides too.

All things considered, an excellent selection here! In 1980 I had an occasion to shoot a few rolls of medium sized Eltachrome through a Yashicamat square format camera. Even on a tripod it was difficult to get the composition/cropping I wanted…

Posted from iPhone

I'm still working on my Photoshop skills.  I played around with the "original" of the first photo and wondered what the TO  experts might recommend to improve either of these versions.  The second version has more "blue."   I'm amazed at what PS can do with many of our not-so-perfect old photos.  Thanks for any suggestions.

Greg Stadter
Phoenix, AZ



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/25 02:23 by E25.

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E25 Wrote:
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> I'm still working on my Photoshop skills.  I
> played around with the "original" of the first
> photo and wondered what the TO  experts might
> recommend to improve either of these versions. 
> The second version has more "blue."   I'm amazed
> at what PS can do with many of our not-so-perfect
> old photos.  Thanks for any suggestions.

Nice job - you did better than I did - I like the sky!  That's the one sort-of unfortunate thing about PS - you can play with it for hours, make all kinds of slightly different versions, and not be able to decide which is the best!

Thanks for your comments, Rob.

More recently, I have been experimenting with the "Camera Raw Filter" in PS which allows for very fine tuning of light and dark features.  It works very well to bring-out the detail in both over and under-exposed details, such as the white in a steam plume or a bright sky, or a shaded area.  Even though its called a "Raw" Filter, you can use it with any image type, jpeg, tiff, etc.

Thanks again for posting those great scenes from your father's camera!

Greg Stadter
Phoenix, AZ

OK, here's my attempt at this one.  I'm using gimp-3.1.5 (bleeding edge) here.  

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Great photos here, including the Photo Shopped. Can't decide which one is best.
The term "Portable Volcano" also comes to mind.
Plus now I'm craving a hamburger due to that Hamburger N&W logo reference.

Jim Baker
Riverside, CA

Didn't N&W test a Class A against an EMD diesel set, and determined their steam design won the power / efficiency contest?  N&W was truly proud of their steam engineering.

Like these pictures