Nostalgia & History > Railroad Turntable Men

In an effort to find a larger version of the photo, up10turntablemorrisonc.jpg, that I posted on “Anyone Know Where It Is?” so that it would be possible to identify the men in the photo I did a Google Image Search for Railroad Turntable Men. I did not find the picture I was looking for but I did find the following terrific photos.

Picture 1 is from the following website,

http://www.texasescapes.com/CentralTexasTownsSouth/Glidden-Texas.htm

“Two years later the town [Glidden] was thriving despite its proximity to the county seat of Columbus. A large hotel was in operation as well as other stores and businesses that catered to the railroad employees. A post office was granted in the late 1880s established in 1888. The population in 1891 was over 200 and tiny Glidden became the largest railroad-maintenance facility between Houston and El Paso.”

Picture 1, “Railroad men pose on Turntable at Glidden Shops Photo Courtesy Nesbitt Memorial Library File #01818.” [I tried to find the picture to in the Nesbitt Memorial Library in case they would have a larger but I could not find it.]

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Picture 2 is from the following website,

http://usmrr.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html

“The Falmouth turntable [model] is nearly done. I noticed in Alexander's book, “Civil War Railroads and Models,” a photo of the Manassas turntable from a slightly different angle than the photo in the on-line National Archives. I initially thought the photos were the same, but in studying them I realized they were two different shots. Compare it to the shot in this first post - Falmouth Turntable in progress.”

Picture 2, “Another view of the Manassas turntable from Alexander's book credited to the Southern Railway Collection. Abdil also has this photo in his book.”

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Kansas City, Mexico and Orient #212 (2-8-0).

Picture 3 is from the following website,

http://usmrr.blogspot.com/search/label/Locomotives

“Doug Gurin recently gave me a copy of this photo. He didn't have any additional information about it so I posted it here in the hope that someone might know more about it. I did some web searching and found that Princeton Junction was the location where a short branch line connected the town of Princeton to the New Jersey Rail Road and Transportation Company in May, 1865.”

“There are several interesting things I noticed in the photo. The obvious gallows turntable in the left foreground. The engine has an enclosed tender and it has the passenger car on its nose. The passenger car has a plain, arched, non-clerestory, roof, and small windows. Note the exterior bracing under the passenger car body. I am not sure why the wood is piled up by the track, possibly fuel? Also note the lack of trees in the background. There also appears to be a cemetery or perhaps encampment in the background. There is currently a legal fight between historical preservationists and the University of Princeton who want to relocate the station and convert it to a bus line. If you know anything about this photo, please post a comment.”

Picture 3, “Princeton Junction, New Jersey.”

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Picture 4 is from the following website,

http://www.journal-news.net/page/content.detail/id/585874/150-years-ago--Stonewall-Jackson-destroyed-Martinsburg-railroad-properties-before-withdrawing.html?nav=5006

“MARTINSBURG - As famous as is the burning of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's roundhouse and shops in Martinsburg by Confederate troops on Oct. 19-20, 1862, there is very little documentation of the incident, Don Silvius, vice president of the Berkeley County Historical Society, said in a recent interview. ‘It rarely is specifically mentioned,’ he said. ‘We've pieced it together.’ Pieced it together from a couple of local diarists, for example. Susan Nourse Riddle of Martinsburg wrote Oct. 19 that the Confederates ‘started destroying the roundhouse.’ And Sarah Morgan McKown of Gerrardstown wrote Oct. 20 that she had heard about fires in Martinsburg the day before. But eyewitness accounts by those involved have not surfaced. ‘There's probably a letter by a soldier describing it, or some documentation, but we haven't found it, yet,’ Silvius said.” More on the above webpage.

Picture 4, Martinsburg.

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Picture 5 is from the following website,

http://texashistory.unt.edu/search/?q=Railroad&t=fulltext&fq=dc_type%3Aimage_photo

Picture 5, “Railroad Depot. Date: unknown. Creator: unknown. Description: Photograph of a group of men standing outside of the train depot. Located at West Bowie and North Madison Streets in Beeville this site was chosen by Uriah Lott to be the depot of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad.” “Well equipped with S.A.A.P. brass spittoons, each depot became a social center. On June 14, 1886, the first San Antonio and Aransas Pass train arrived in Beeville to a cheering crown. After the takeover of S.A.A.P. by Southern Pacific in 1925, the depot became a S.P. Station. In 1958, the depot was razed, and the last train left Bee County in 1994.”

Wikipedia has a webpage on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_and_Aransas_Pass_Railway

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Picture 6 is from the following website,

http://www.camargotownship.lib.il.us/online-photo-resource/digitized-photo-archive/railroad

Picture 6, “C & EI Railroad Depot in Old Town (Villa Grove) 1893 Ten men/boys--Identified subject(s): Railroad Depot; C & EI Depot; Siders, Robert; Frazier, George; Teague, Morris; Ritter, Frank O.; Tegar, William F.; Irwin, Paul F.; Walls, John; Howard, Horace E.; Stanford, David; Howard, William F.; Telegraph Office; Old Town,”

Wikipedia has a webpage for the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_and_Eastern_Illinois_Railroad

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Picture 7 is from the following website,

http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=34910

Picture 7, “The Coos Bay, Roseburg & Eastern Railroad and Navigation Co. is my prototype. They started building in 1891 in Marshfield (today Coos Bay) had gone 5 miles to Dunham its first year, another 5 miles the next to reach Cedar Point. 1893 found 5 more miles built putting the end of line at Coquille City (now the County seat). They then got a burst of energy to build to Myrtle Point to arrive in August of that year. The Spreckles people bought the Railroad in 1903 and sold it to Southern Pacific in 1906. Then in about 1914 the Smith-Powers Company built a Railroad to Powers (to be operated by the SP as a Common Carrier) and turned up into the forest as a logging line operated by Smith-Power. In 1894 she had 3 engines, 5 boxcars, about 10 “coal” cars, 30 flatcars and 50 logging cars. One Caboose and one passenger car rounded out the rolling stock. So why was this railroad built? Eons ago the Coquille River shifted its course from empting out into Coos Bay to entering the sea were Brandon is located today. The Coquille Valley had some potential to be farmed and grazed and a whole lot of timber. These products of this valley needed easy transportation into Coos Bay and to the sea (the mouth of the Coquille had its problems once you finally got there through several twists and turns the river takes in the last few miles). Additionally, on the peninsula that separates Coos Bay from the sea, Coal was found. And there was a market for coal in San Francisco and this coal supported two relatively successful mines. One of these mines was owned by the interest that built the railroad.”

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Two websites for people interested in photography.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2235202/Machu-Picchu-captured-highest-resolution-Zoomable-picture-Inca-citadel-allows-viewers-impressive-detail.html

The following excerpt is from the above website.

“Machu Picchu captured in highest ever resolution: Zoomable picture of Inca citadel allows viewers to see it in impressive detail. The picture is actually a collage of nearly 2,000 individual images taken one-by-one then spliced together on computer.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/science/for-web-images-creating-new-technology-to-seek-and-find.html?hpw

The following excerpt if from the above website.

“STANFORD, Calif. — You may think you can find almost anything on the Internet. But even as images and video rapidly come to dominate the Web, search engines can ordinarily find a given image only if the text entered by a searcher matches the text with which it was labeled. And the labels can be unreliable, unhelpful (“fuzzy” instead of “rabbit”) or simply nonexistent.
To eliminate those limits, scientists will need to create a new generation of visual search technologies — or else, as the Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li recently put it, the Web will be in danger of ‘going dark.’

Now, along with computer scientists from Princeton, Dr. Li, 36, has built the world’s largest visual database in an effort to mimic the human vision system. With more than 14 million labeled objects, from obsidian to orangutans to ocelots, the database has because a vital resource for computer vision researchers.”

If that 3rd photo was Priceton Jct, then that was the PRR we were looking at?

BlackWidow Wrote:
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> If that 3rd photo was Priceton Jct, then that was
> the PRR we were looking at?


I believe it is... and from what I can see in the photo that locomotive is almost certainly an ex-Camden & Amboy 4-4-0.

The blog from where I obtained Picture 3 gave three websites for further information.

http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2011/02/princetons_little_engine_that.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Branch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_New_Jersey_Railroad_and_Canal_Company

That last photo is quite intriguing--the locomotive looks like something that might be dubbed a "steam-critter" and the whole train would appear to have a fairly low top speed.