Nostalgia & History > Night Light in the West Bottoms

On the night of September 4, 1977 I had been chasing solo all around the Kansas City metro area. When the sun went down I didn't want the day to stop, so I extended it by chasing my tripod around for a bit. In taking these shots I was totally by myself without a care for personal safety. I wouldn't even think about doing such a thing today, but back then I never gave it a second thought.

It was my first full year of railfan photography every aspect of the hobby was brand-new to me. I was trying to soak up things as fast as I could. Particularly enthralling to me was when I discovered how useful a tripod was. The ability to set up a tripod and get good shot for however long I could count was an exciting technological prospect. I was like a little boy in a candy store; I couldn't get enough. It was definitely a learning process and I threw away quite a lot of my early attempts, but every now & then I'd score a "keeper".

I took this shot from what is now the corner intersection of Genesee & 25th Sts. I've some vague memory that the intersection might have been configured a little bit different in those days. My camera is looking NNE toward the Old Union Depot Interlocking area. The Frisco & ICG would also be in the background darkness, but the red neon lights of the "American Royal" are just visible off to the left.

1. KC Terminal trackage looking NNE from W 25th St near Santa Fe Junction Interlocking.
photo taken September 4, 1977

Thanks for looking back!
Lance Garrels
santafe199



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 05/03/22 16:28 by santafe199.

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I can imagine an engineer thinking "which one is mine"?

I have been through there many times before they recently replaced all of these low pot signals with overhead bridges. Now you can see why we called this the "Strawberry Patch".

Oh yeah, "The Cherry Patch" as we called it on UP. Thanks for the photo.

Bob Krieger
Cheyenne, WY

tomstp Wrote:
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> I can imagine an engineer thinking "which one is
> mine"?


Exactly right, we had several guys fired over there delivering trains to foreign yards after the Emporia run-thru was implimented in Sept 0f '88. Some of the signals were left handed, but it was kinda up to you to figure out which ones. Real easy to go by a red one not knowing it was yours. They improved that by eliminating a bunch of those close together signals in the SF JCT-Gooseneck, Hannibal bridge areas since then. They also removed a lot of the pot signals and put them overhead.

I am 48. I spent a lot of evenings at Santa Fe junction as a kid. We look back at this same view today and always wished that we had taken more shost like this at night with all of the ground signals lit up. Thanks for posting and thanks for stirring up some great memories. I wish I could show that to my father. He would have loved it.
John