Nostalgia & History > Switcher Saturday - NYC It all begins somewhere.

Thanks to GCM for posting  his wonderful stock loading movies the other day which inspired me to dig these out.  These two questionable images are the very first photographs I ever took.  The scene is the Sherman St overpass in Beech Grove IN in either 1957 or 58.  The negs were lost long ago and what remains are two bedraggled prints captured by my dads Rollei.  How much I had yet to learn!   But they led to thousands more images of ( I hope)  better quality since those early days.  My dad was not a railfan but would drop me off near the end of the  viaduct where he would park and read ham radio magazines.   In the meantime, I absorbed whatever was occuring at the Beech Grove rider hump, where these two FM's were working. To the north were long lines of dead steam power that were awaiting scrapping. They looked terribly forlorned and it was too sad to take a very distant shot after I'd seen them so close  and alive only a few years earlier.  Soon we'd be moving and this area and all that it held were lost for me for all times-except for these few images that remind me of my embrionic interests at 9 or 10 years old.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/08/22 10:29 by Conch.

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Not questionable at all.
Images as an 8 year old - excellent !
Gary



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/08/22 10:53 by gcm.

A Rollei - Great camera. As to these photos, considering you don't have the negatives, these are good copies. It looks like those were rare FM H20-44 locomotives.
Bob

Looking good to me, my first photos as a kid with a box camera were quite laughable (and long lost), but like you said we needed to go through these steps on our way to taking better shots, and all the great images you post here (plus the goodies in print) prove that it worked! Thanks for posting...

JG

Wow, even as sad as the impending fate of steamers in the yard is, watching, and hearing, FM H20's in lightning stripes seems an experience I would love to have had.  Thank you for sharing your photos with us!

Matthew Dittert

As a small child, I think the first two letters of the alphabet I learned were B and O - from seeing them hundreds of times on the sides of those hopper cars of the '60's.