Nostalgia & History > Sunset Limited Now Arriving to Houston - 41 Years Apart

I know I'm preaching to the choir when I talk about the passage of time and how nothing stays the same. Change seemingly occurs at a frantic pace.
Yet at certain levels, the passage of time is slower. Railroads, locomotive models, rolling stock, and paint schemes seem to be in constant flux.
But the fixed plant, the environment in which railroading takes place, changes much more slowly.

Case in point: these two images of Amtrak #2 arriving to the Houston depot were captured from virtually the same spot, but separated by 41 years.
Nothing in image #1 remains today. SPTCO, F7's, heritage passenger equipment: all are long gone. Yet the overall panorama hasn't changed that much.
Certain contours make the scene instantly recognizable as the same: the angled platform canopy, the curved track, the straight edges of the concrete
platform.

#1- This October 1972 arrival of #2 illustrates a time before Amtrak even had a paint scheme, operating its trains with the vintage equipment
it acquired from the different railroads in April 1971.

#2 - Amtrak's current look is illustrated by this November 15, 2013 arrival of the Sunset limited.

Robert Pierce
Sugar Land, TX
SWRails.com

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I vote for the 1972 Train.
ALLEN

Like your take on this passage of time thing Robert. Reminds me of the scenes in that great old movie "The Time Machine", when the lady fashion dummy in the department store window rapidly goes through a few decades of clothing styles, but the building stays the same!

I was comparing the buildings in the background of both photos, same building or not?

Plus those boxcars on the right side background of photo #1 sure look like they are on a real tightly curved industry track?

Jim Baker
Riverside, CA



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/18 00:39 by RailRat.

That reflection of 6455's nose makes image one even more interesting.
Bob

What some might find ironic, others hilarious, still others "just wrong" - many of those "vintage" cars in the first photo are "younger" (in that photo) than many of the cars in the second one.

Every time I think of time, I think how FAR back WW II was for me growing up. It's very difficult for me to believe that at this moment, the first war in Iraq is further away now than that earlier war was to me.

Your talisman might be cars, planes, skylines, ball parks, highways, music....but - and this comes up all the time with modelers - your touchstone "era" seems to be that in which you were in your teens to late 20s.

For some, an SD40-2 looks far too "modern". It's difficult to believe but some of those are far older than the GP9s that some considered ancient in the 70s.

Time is relative, as is the passage of it. <enter physics joke here>

Nice shots! Top shot! Old SP RR T&E crews, based at San Antonio, TX and worked to and from Houston, on that passenger train in that top shot.

Ah, what a wonderful slide is your #1 looking like the real Sunset Limited with FP-7 power and LWT streamlined low level cars , which were far more comfortable than superliners . Seeing your slide of 1972 reminds me how lucky I was to see a similar #2 in San Antonio in 1968. Thanks for posting.

Great posting.

As the years went on, the poor Sunset handled fewer and fewer passengers as the equipment pool got smaller.

Very cool