Nostalgia & History > BB82: Bruce @ Bruce

Wonder what he was thinking when he took this shot? Date was 9/3/72 and on the C&NW in SD ... classic in it's simplicity.

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Even though you can't see the ties,  the ROW looks like someone mows it.  Interesting!

With great composition already in place, I'm wondering what Mr Fogg could have done with this image... :^)

Lance



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/12/21 20:47 by santafe199.

Many of us 80 year olds can remember lots of scenes like this as we grew up with them.  Many branch lines had a train a day, some two.  A lot only during harvest season.  Whatever, it was  lightly  used but, a railroad.

Thanks for posting.

I went google earth to find Bruce SD. You can barely see where the tracks used to run through the now tilled fields 

Nice shot!  Seems like they would have invented hoppers earlier than they did.  Box cars were such a hassle for loading grain.  Had to put in grain doors and then drag it empty.

RC Lundgren
Elgin, TX

RC I could be wrong but I believe back then many of the branches couldn't handle covered hoppers with their high center of gravity loading on poor track.

Exprail 

One reason the box cars lasted so long is some poorer railroads like C&NW didn't have the money to buy them. A second reason is they coould ship boxcars out from big cities with merchandise and equipment and then retrun them with grain.

They could be unoaded at large terminal elevators with a big machine that grabed onto each end of the car and then tip it on an angle after the grain door was taken out to unload it. After tipping it on its side the machine would tip the car up on the end to move the grain toward the door and then tipped the opposite way to unload the other end. It was quite a machine.

In the early 1960's I worked for a farmer and he delivered grain by semi to the Cargil export elevator on the south side of Chicago and they had one of these. Lucikily for me we often had lenghty waits and I could watch them unload.

Bruce Stikkers
St. Joseph, IL

Great evocative shot.  When I was a TM in Chicago I watched the turntable like device that grabbed the car's wheels and turned the car on it's side and shook the grain out.  One great inefficiency was that there quite a few cars that had holes in their floors that would allow grain to fall onto the tracks.