Nostalgia & History > Breaking the Railfan Photo Rules

Some images seem to break all the rules. While four PC units are seen, because of the angle none is totally visible. Even 1687 has part of its nose hidden. Still the congestion of the engine facility of Collinwood Yard in Cleveland, Ohio has a beauty of its own. It is October 8, 1972, and this is the way locomotives were spotted. This isn't the clean, everything-just-right shot so many like. Instead it is a slice of reality. This was the way it was...
Bob



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/27/15 18:08 by refarkas.

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But Bob, I hope you walked around and took some "clean" shots of each locomotive where possible.

Marty

Some times you have to take what you get...

James Nelson
Thornton, CO
www.flickr.com/mojaveflyer

Nice pictures.

That was a good slice of the L&HR roster in those days

No Rules!
SR

AMEN!! Making your own rules is how the world moves forward...

Bill Deaver
Tehachapi, CA

"No Rules" is Rule #21 in my book!
 

I see three rules.

RULE 1:  It must be related to vehicles that ride on rails but vehicles may or may not be in the photograph.

RULE 2:  The photographer need not be a railfan.

RULE 3:  It must be shared with other railfans.


Marty Bernard

What rules? When you walk around a terminal you see locomotives lined this way. Everything doesn't have to be a "weggie".

I've posted this in other contexts--it's an example of something that was unremarkable when the photo was taken in Sept. 1971, but now has an unforseen element.  I'm referring to the price board on the now-vanished Chevron station at Market & Duboce in San Francisco.  28.9 cents per gallon would seem like "Paradise Lost" to modern day motorists.  



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/27/15 22:10 by DNRY122.

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DNRY122 Wrote:

> 28.9 cents per gallon would seem like "Paradise Lost" to modern
> day motorists.  

Oddly enough, if you don't look at where the decimal point is, the numbers are just about the same right now as they were then. 

Yeah, I drove a VW in those days (late 60's) and figured a penny a mile. For a RT from Santa Barbara to the Bay Area for the week end to see my GF: seven bucks would cover it.
SR

Look even closer and you'll see the Chevron name (on the price sign).  If I recall, the Chevron name was used the for the services/products Standard Oil provided.  Eventually the Standard name faded away.
SR

The gas station's lighting - those fixtures on the pole each probably harbored a 300 watt incandescent lamp.
With LEDs, I'll bet that the entire station can be illuminated with 300 watts.
...Lorenzo

This may be a job for a "fuelfan"--I think that Chevron stations were individually owned and Standard stations belonged to Standard Oil of California.  When the trust-busters went after Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire back a hundred and some-odd years ago, we wound up with divested entities such as Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. (Standard Oil Co. of New York) which operated under the Mobilgas brand ("at the sign the flying red horse").

That's an old school service station, where they actually had a bay or two where people would work on cars.  you would drive over a hose that would ding a bell to let them know there was a customer, and all the ladies would get "full service" where the guy in the uniform would come out and top off your tank, wash your windows and maybe check your oil, too.  i vaguely remember this from the 1970s and it seems to me that small towns still had service station businesses like that well into the '80s, but I've rarely seen anything like that since.  They started building convenience stores where nobody made any money off selling gas, but all the profit came from selling snacks and drinks at a high margin.  You couldn't get your car fixed there anymore and the overworked cashier probably doesn't even know how to change their own oil, if they could afford a car on those wages.  There was something else about measuring the tanks and trying to keep out water that they used to do that isn't done anymore, but I don't recall what that was, exactly.  Old stuff like this popping up in train pictures is pretty cool to me, even if it does break some "rules" somehow.