Nostalgia & History > Keystone Viaduct Styalized

Here is my rendition of the former Western Maryland Railway's Keystone Viaduct, located just east of Meyersdale, Pa. Today it acts as one of the many impressive structures along the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) Rail's to Trail's Trail, between Pittsburgh, Pa and Cumberland, Md. If you are not familiar with my artwork, I have produced a number of images of locations along the former B&O's right-of-ways, between Washington D.C. and Cumberland, Md as well as points west toward Connellsville, Pa and Grafton, WV. I have published them on the Eastern Railroads forum in the past.

You can see all of my COLOR on the Rails series of works on my website at www.matthewjablonski.com/color-on-the-rails.html.

My artistic process is entirely digital, using Adobe Illustrator. In respect to where Illustrator lies within the Adobe umbrella, it is just a step above Photoshop. Unlike Photoshop, it is a vector-formatted application, which offers a number of advantages. One of the biggest is that it is entirely within one's computer, not an external device, like a camera, which would use its limited abilites in raster-form, where pixelation may occur. That enables me to print it in any size I desire; it could be as small as a business card or as large as a billboard, and still maintain each shapes' crispness, without any pixelation issues. One observation I have made is that its solid-color style causes it to have a strikingly similarity to silk-screen printing, a method of which has been around for over one-hundred years. Simultaineously, here I am using a cutting-edge, innovative form of technology, to achieve practically the same appearence more than a century later.

Matthew



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/19 10:35 by Cumberland.

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Matthew - great work, I'd say you captured it well.  For comparison, here is a shot of Keystone Viaduct when it was still in service.  Most of WM's Connellsville Subdivision was taken out of service in May 1975, but a couple of segments were kept in service for a while longer.  One of those segments, about four miles of the old WM main line, was over Keystone Viaduct, to access a coal loader at Blue Lick, northwest of Meyersdale.  Crews switching this loader used a connection to the B&O between Sand Patch and Keystone.  This is a Blue Lick Turn pulling loads across Keystone Viaduct, on October 15, 1978.  I understand this operation continued sporadically until 1991, not sure of the exact date.  I was lucky not only to catch this irregular operation, but to get a clean WM unit leading.  



 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/19 20:31 by cr7998.

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cr7998 Wrote:
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> Matthew - great work, I'd say you captured it
> well.  For comparison, here is a shot of Keystone
> Viaduct in its last days of service.  This was
> one of the last trains to use the viaduct.  Most
> of WM's Connellsville Subdivision was taken out of
> service in May 1975, but a couple of segments were
> kept in service for a while longer.  One of those
> segments, about four miles of the old WM main
> line, was over Keystone Viaduct, to access a coal
> loader at Blue Lick, northwest of Meyersdale. 
> Crews switching this loader used a connection to
> the B&O between Sand Patch and Keystone.  This is
> one of the last Blue Lick Turns, pulling loads
> across Keystone Viaduct, on October 15, 1978. 
> Coal loading ceased at Blue Lick soon
> afterwards.  I was lucky not only to catch this
> job, which only ran once or twice a week, but also
> to get a clean WM unit leading.  
>
>
>
>  cr7998, now this is a gem of a photo. I thank you for sharing.
John Breitigan
Washington, PA.

Thanks for the complements and sharing the photo of Keystone Viaduct!

One of the challenges I encountered while creating my illustration was what cars I should use. Making the colors of the train vs. the bridge was incredibly important, in making the train the viewers' focal point. This was especially relevent because such a big majority of the WM's equipment used brown and white for the colors of their logo - go figure! So I had to really brainstorm ideas and look at photos of WM trains to find colorful cars, that would stand out from all of those rusty browns of the bridge.

Matthew



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/19 15:13 by Cumberland.

You do some great work. You should be doing advertising artwork for today's ralroads like Howard Fog did for the P&LE.

Victor A. Baird
http://www.erstwhilepublications.com

Matthew - great job on the freight cars.  The consist looks much like what might have been seen with the WM's manifest trains such as AJ-2 or WM-6.  

I had to edit my first post on this thread, as the operation lasted much longer than I thought.  Warren1977, who like me is a member of the WM Historical Society, advised that the last train moved over Keystone Viaduct in 1991.  Thanks to Warren1977 for providing that correction.    

I am also a WMRHS member and presented this artwork for the first time to the public at their 2019 Annual Convention last Friday evening. I have been a member since 1994, when I was only in 2nd grade. I can only dream of what its operations were like.

The saturation of it here on TO is significantly higher because I unfortunately had to convert it to jpeg-format, to put it on the website, instead of its native Illustrator appearence. But at least it sounds like I accurately captured it, making me even more proud of this artwork, after spending over a hundred hours in its design.

Matthew

cr7998 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Matthew - great job on the freight cars.  The
> consist looks much like what might have been seen
> with the WM's manifest trains such as AJ-2 or
> WM-6.  
  



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/19 22:30 by Cumberland.