Nostalgia & History > The Needles Subdivision - a study in B & W......

The fast setting sun offers but a fleeting moment of low winter lighting, as SF30-C 9516 and mates have this westbound "shooter" moving at track speed. The warmth from the exhaust lingers but briefly, and the first hint of the evening coolness becomes evident......

Milepost 678X near Siberia clearly illustrates the addition of the South Track in 1923. The original alignment on the 1.4% ascending grade, bears hard right on the upper embankment, and from the next straight section of track, to the Summit at Ash Hill, one can trace many earlier alignments with ease......

The "wye" at Ash Hill Summit stands in grand defiance of time, as do so many things in the desert. Its use to turn steam helpers long since obviated by cab (and later hood) diesels, then LocoTrol, and now DPU's, today it would see use only by the occasional M-O-W move, or bad order set-outs by westbounds. Now that CTC has closed the gap between Daggett and Ibis, one wonders how much longer it will grace the apex named to honor the lines' original Surveyor, Southern Pacific's Benjamin Ash......

Thanks for looking,

Bob

ATSF100WEST......Out

---

---

---

NICE! I think the Black & White really reinforces the desolate nature of the terrain....

NH2006 - whoa, for a second there I sounded like an effete intellectual. Now back to my beer...

Wonderful shots, Bob. I always look forward to your B & W s.

Thanks for sharing.

Bob Helling
PRose

Great work, Bob. The first shot certainly shows the vastness of the Mojave.
Keep on contributin'.

I don't know how many times I've been up close to the tracks out there watching something go by, and then turned around to walk away only to be faced with the vastness of the desert. Big desert, comparitively small trains, often harsh lighting. Black and white better captures the sense of scale and proportion such conditions provide by eliminating non-essentials, and to my mind color can rapidly become non-essential in such a land of extremes. Don't get me wrong, though, since sometimes color becomes the theme in springtime or when the ground is damp, saturating the natural earth hues as well. But for things like this, where the point is to be minimalistic if not outright graphic, black and white says it best.

- Kit

Nice work Bob! I think in addition to what several people have mentioned about black and white, your composition choices also do a nice job of depicting the vastness of the desert and the relative smallness of the railroad. Take the first image as an example, while the train is still the major focus the use of a wider angle lens and choosing to place the lead locomotive in a less prominent location show off the scale of the desert.

I can't wait for my visit there in September...