European Railroad Discussion > An American shoots a European classic!

I’m posting this thread on dual forums, something I’ve done only once before. In the April of ’13 Kathi & I took a 2-week driving vacation down through the SE quadrant of the US of A. Our primary goal was Key West, Florida. Naturally I ended up with a few hundred images to consider for posting here on TO. Everything I posted went on the Eastern forum, but since I’m a regular Western forum contributor I doubled up there as well. But this dual post involves a distance just a wee bit longer than the 1700+ mile one way drive from Manhattan, KS to Key West. This one involves Germany, and there is a small matter of one HUGE pond to consider. I’ve heard it’s not an easy drive…

For all of my European railfan brothers & sisters I’ll briefly set the table: For nearly 5 years I’ve been in an ongoing labor of railfan love. I’m scanning & archiving the massive William Arthur Gibson (both Sr =Bill & Jr =Art) collection. Bill, who passed away in 1983 got started with black & white in the 1920s, converting to Kodachrome in June of 1955 (same month in which I was born). And his son Art, now just about to turn 80 got his start under Bill’s tutelage while still an early 1940s adolescent. So there is a considerable amount of fantastic & historical material to work with from both men. With Art’s gracious blessing I’m posting a regular series called “WAG Wednesday” from the Gibson collection. W-A-G are the initials of both father & son, and both railfans were/are affectionately known as WAG Sr and/or WAG Jr to the vast majority of their friends and cohorts. In my scanning task I’m always finding new stuff I want to jump all over & get posted. It’s very difficult to “keep my eye on the ball” and keep an organized and steady scanning program going. With a bit less self-discipline I could easily shoot off in half a dozen different scanning/posting directions, simultaneously! At any given time I’ll find an image or 2 (or 6… or 12…) that makes me want to drop everything and get scanned/edited/posted in one fell swoop. And once in a while I DO drop everything when I find something way too cool to resist. The gorgeous image below is one of those images.

A very interesting part of the Gibson collection is one I’ve organized & titled: “z Misc Trader Slides”. All of you older fans here on TO will know what I’m talking about in a heartbeat. As basic rule of thumb, a given railfan photographer’s slide collection of any size at all is bound to have trader slides in it. The father & son Gibsons were certainly no exception to this rule. Over the decades Bill & Art have traded slides & B/W material with a veritable roll-call of noted railfan photographers. One of those photographers is Mr Joseph M. McMillan, of McMillan Publications fame. A few of us who have known Joe since the late 70s/early 80s have respectfully referred to him as “Joe M”. In the Gibson trader slide collection I found this shot Joe took while serving in the United States Army. He was Company Commander for the 83rd engineer battalion while stationed in Germany. In a short phone chat he filled me in on a few basic facts about his service time there. The one I like the best is where described how his US Army “duties” took him all over some interesting & very scenic territory around Germany, “forcing” him to observe a considerable amount of rail (including lots of steam) and street car action. Of course, he just happened to be carrying a camera on a regular basis! And being paid to be there certainly didn’t hurt, either. I already knew the answer, but I still piped up with the query: “Probably a lot better than Viet Nam in 1967, huh?” (He answered with a polite, but deservedly dry little chuckle… ;^)

1. DB electric scene (commuter train?) near Bietigheim, West Germany on October 21, 1967. I did a brief Google Maps search, but couldn’t find any waterway close to Bietigheim. I did find what looks to be an old RR right-of-way running in a rough SW to NE angle. Any ‘fill-in’ details would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
(Kodachrome slide by Joseph M. McMillan, from the Art Gibson collection)

Thanks for looking across the pond!
Lance Garrels (santafe199)
Art Gibson (wag216)
(with “Joe M” sitting in… :^)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/16 13:55 by santafe199.

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A quick search brought up this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bietigheim_Viaduct

The train is a very common sight from those days, when I was a child, I always found them boring, and now we're excited about such images...The coaches are the standard stainless regional ones that were still quite new then, they were the first big new lot built after the war; some of them are still around, but have been painted red now.
Greetings from Germany

Hartmut

Posted from Android

sys3175 Wrote: > ...A quick search...

Thanks for the link! It was an interesting read. But I have a question: When I Googled (Maps) "Bietigheim, Germany" I get the same with NO visible river or any other waterway. But when I Google "Bietigheim Viaduct" I get another Bietigheim, complete with the Enz River & the RR line! What am I missing...

Lance Garrels (KS-USA)
'santafe199'

Thanks, Lance, for posting this image. I did not know what shot you were scanning. This certainly isn't the best one. The better views that I have are of trains headed the other direction with the full reflection of the train and bridge. This bridge is in Bietigheim-Bissingen, 23 kilometers north of Stuttgart, and is still there carrying DB trains across the Enz River. (The Enz joins the Neckar River a short distance beyond the viaduct.) The bridge was damaged in WWII and somewhere in my archives I have the army repair plans for it. (I received the plans years ago from an ex-serviceman who was involved in the project.) Trains headed to the right will round a 90 degree curve into a major junction and the Bietigheim-Bissingen station. If you were riding a train from Karlsruhe to Stuttgart, you would pass over this bridge. My engineering unit was involved in a project near here and I passed by this location going to and from the site. I always carried a camera with me and often on the way home in the evenings I would stop here for a photo or two.

There are two Bietigheims :-) One near the Rhine, which is the wrong one, one near Stuttgart, officially called Bietigheim-Bissingen, when you look it up on Google Maps, you can actually see the shadow of the viaduct.
Hartmut

Posted from Android

Thank you for sharing this stunning photo! It's like a book cover! And the story behind is very interesting. Definitely worth of writing a book of memories about  the time, feelings, hobby...
 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/24/16 08:56 by Stas.