Railroaders' Nostalgia > Conway, KS in weird light

I’m thinking maybe Art’s negative here was accidently fogged just a slight bit. That might explain the depot’s ghostly aura, an effect that triggered my reference to “weird light”. If you are looking close up at this image you don’t notice it so much. But when you step back from your monitor it really becomes pronounced.

The Conway, Kansas depot was 6½ miles west of McPherson on the old Santa Fe branch line bearing the same name. The SFe Middle Division McPherson District ran 98.5 miles between Florence on the traditional passenger main, out to Ellinwood and a junction with the 5th District (original main line to Colorado). When I hired out in 1978 I can remember so many of the veteran “old heads” talking about their time spent working #87/#88. This was the dreaded, 145+ mile long all-stops-local between Emporia & Ellinwood. Apparently that job would stop to switch nearly every single station along the way, without end. And in the days before the Feds passed the 12-hour dog law, 16-hour days were the rule rather than the exception. Many of those old heads claimed to have been force-assigned to the job for long stretches early in their careers when they had no seniority to speak of. After hearing a gazillion such tales of woe, I started adding up all the collective time spent working that job. And I came to the conclusion that there HAD to be 3 or 4 sections of that local working each way, every day… ;^)

By the late 1970s Santa Fe’s branch line depots were starting to disappear. Even so this old depot lasted into the 80s. No doubt because of the huge natural gas fields located in the immediate area, which had to be switched virtually every day. During my Santa Fe days I accumulated some very daunting experience switching big jumbo gas tanks there. More than once I worked one of the brakeman’s jobs on the McPherson Roadswitcher, which we covered off the brakeman’s extra board down in Emporia. I’m exceedingly glad I never had to run a switch list at Conway. The gas racks were plentiful and very complicated, and I would have been 110% lost! But there was an “up” side: As I recall Conway had a little café just a hop & a skip from the depot. It was one of those classic little small-town beaneries where everything on the menu got a grade of A+ or better. Now it’s merely an empty piece of ground, just like the spot where the depot once stood.

One late afternoon at Conway I did gain some experience of a distinctly different nature: ( https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,2903476,2903476#msg-2903476 ). That was a “one & done” thing, for sure. I don’t recall ever working in Conway again after that… Today my old Santa Fe territory, including those gas racks is operated by the K&O. They now bring all that business down the old Mop branch to Newton where the BNSF receives it in interchange for forwarding on…

1. AT&SF depot at Conway, KS on December 25, 1968. My first working visit to Conway would come over a decade later…
BW neg by William A. -Art- Gibson (WAG) Jr.

Thanks for looking back!
Lance Garrels (santafe199)
Art Gibson (wag216)



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/30/20 11:35 by santafe199.

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I tried to send two files for this article of the Conway depot showing a before and after shot just before it was razed.  The second shot shows the depot during dismantling and how they had sided over the original depot painted a dark red (system colors back in the first days of the ATSF) and the other shot just before the razing started.   Both were shot in the early 1980's, and the picture of the red depot was pure luck as I was driving by on my way to either a thanksgiving or Christmas celebration in Scott City, Ks.in the early 80's.  I spent many hours on that branch and my first pay trip as a fireman was to McPherson on train 1361 in December of 1977 where my rest in the Wheatstate motel was disrupted  by amorous activity in an adjoining room. (not another railroader though).  
   The long trains of LP gas we hauled off that branch were amazing especially that there was only one spectacular derailment near Lehigh Kansas where a couple of the tank cars derailed and exploded.    The Rock Island trackage we ran over at the time from Marion to Peabody Kansas was very rough with piles of boxcars in the ditches ever so often marking the Rocks attitude of shove them aside and throw down shoo fly and keep moving trains.   We used mostly cf7 power and other EMD locos like gp7's.   Those were in the good old days when the RR was ran like it had been ran for many years.   Thanks to Lance for the jogging of the memory.

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Assuming this was scanned from a print, this looks like an attempt to "burn in" the sky (not entirely successfully).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodging_and_burning
 

this is a shot digitized from an original slide probably kodachrome.  No attempt was made to enhance the exposure.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/28/20 13:51 by atsfer.

Didn't go out that way too many times,but i remember stopping once when I was in the training program. I don't remember all the details, but there was an argument between the engineer and the operator about whether or not we had to sign for a train order. The next time I was on that job, the building had been demolished, burned, and the pile was still smoking when we went by.

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With regard to the black & white image in this thread, my caption says it all.

As for the other two images of the Conway station, a litle work in Photoshop (literally two minutes on each image) yields much more pleasant results.

Photoshop is your friend here. Making no attempt to retouch an image from a scanned slide typically doesn't yield very good results. You have to do a little retouching work on every scanned image to get all the color and detail the film has to offer.

 

Rich Melvin
Columbus, OH
My Web Site



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/29/20 21:30 by Rich_Melvin.

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I think I first became aware of the Conway depot when I saw a very old picture of it on page 141 of Grant & Bohi's The Country Railroad Station in America.  The same photo is available on kansasmemory.org:

https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/442411

The bay window style fascinated me - not the typical 3-window affair with roof gable interrupting the main roofline, practically a Santa Fe signature, but a four window bay with its roof tucked up under the main eaves.  That style of bay seemed to show up mostly on depots built around 1880, or earlier depots originally built without a bay that had one added later.  In the case of Conway, it was the former.  The depot was built in 1880 to something of a standard 24x42 design duplicated at other places between Ellinwood and Marion as well as stations on the Alma Branch like Harveyville and Eskridge (also built in 1880). The only known survivor of this plan is the Lehigh, KS depot that is now (I hope) being restored at Walton, KS:

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,4414190

Both Lehigh and Conway were built with vertical board and batten siding.  Some time after that KSHS photo was taken, they were rebuilt with clapboard siding, probably in the early 1920's before the new Colonial Yellow paint scheme for depots had reached the branchlines. 

Dad and I passed through Conway on a depot-hunting trip in 1990, and I while I didn't really expect it to still be trackside at that late date, I at least hoped it might have been purchased and moved offsite in town as numerous other small-town depots had been.  I was surprised to find that not only was there no depot at Conway, there was also no town!  Usually these small Kansas towns had an elevator and a quaint brick-paved Main St. with a store or some other enterprise where a person might tap local knowledge about the disposition of the depot.  Not so at Conway - nothing but the tracks and the gas fields.  And so, with tears in our eyes, we pressed on eastward hoping our luck would turn (we ultimately did find depots still trackside at McPherson, Galva, and Marion).  When McMillan's Wheat Lines and Super Freights came out a couple of years later, the caption to a 1974 photo of the modernized Conway depot on page 59 told us we would have been wasting our time hunting for the Conway depot anyway - it was razed in 1983.

In the grand scheme of things, there's nothing special about the Conway depot - just another Santa Fe small town frame depot whose time ran out in the 1980's.  Still, that photo in Bohi's book planted it in my mind, and every time I see a photo of the Conway depot, it's almost like seeing an old friend again - a friend I never knew.

Rich,what in the world would make you put a post like this on the site. That is totally uncalled for. TROLLS who come on here like this is the reason why I have not posted much anymore. Your post is ridiculous and adds nothing to this site. Folks come to this site to enjoy themselves  and not to see what some crackpot can stir up. There is nothing wrong with this photo and shows what detail the old station looked like. This is the worst post that I've seen here in a long time and has no business on here. If you don't like the photo, then move on and not click or comment on it instead of making such a foolish response.

Don Winslow
Glendora, CA
http://www.donwinslow.net/Railroads

I try to help someone improve their image quality and I'm a troll?

Wow. I'll sure not bother to do that again.

Rich Melvin
Columbus, OH
My Web Site

Rich_Melvin Wrote: > ... Horrible Photoshop work to brighten the station ruined the image with this blown-out sky
Why didn't you just go ahead and have Todd make those humongoloid red arrows flash on & off. Surely you could have been even more condescending than you were with this amateur excrement.

Rich_Melvin Wrote: > ... I try to help someone... and I get called a troll? ...
That's what you call "helping" someone, is it??? If you take exception to being called a troll, WHY did you spew forth like a troll  

Rich_Melvin Wrote: > ...  With regard to the black & white image in this thread, my caption says it all ...
With regard to your off-the-chart rudeness & tactless delivery your crass mouth spewed it all.

Where in the world did you learn your manners... chump university??? That's where you got your bully pulpit diploma, is it???

Rich_Melvin Wrote: > ... Wow. I'll sure not bother to do that again ...
A conservative estimation tells me there will be several dozen TO members very glad to hear that. I base that on the nearly 2,000 friendly, positive PMs I've received from other TO members who seem to like what I've been doing for 9+ years.

Your biggest problem is you may be able to type English, but apparently you CAN'T READ plain English. Go back and READ my very first sentence. Everyone I have talked to agrees: If you could have READ my first sentence you never would have bared your ass like you did. Your 2nd problem is you think you know everything there is to know about everything. If you had such an earth-shaking problem with the "quality" of my posted photo you could have inquired POLITELY about it. And I would have politely explained that my reaction to the raw image out of the scanner was one of amusement. Once I saw the image #straight out of the scanner# I knew I would incorporate that "weird" aura around the depot into my thread title.  (By the way: I've done enough B/W negative work to know what fogging looks like.) And because I started to remember several RR career-oriented things about the depot and the branch line it used to be on, I converted this from a "Depot Friday" thread into another RRer's Nostalgia recollection. Which I get regular requests for, such as: "...please keep your stories & photos coming." But you had to jump up from your swampy bully pulpit and turn this thread into "Rich Melvin's photo-editing virility session". And that brings us to your 3rd problem. You apparently think you have carte blanche to take anyone's photo and edit it to your own lofty standards. As you did with my the 2 images posted by my friend "atsfer". He is still fairly new here on TO and to my recollection these are some of the very first images he's ever posted, which I've been encouraging. And I don't believe he has any photo-editing software. But you had to troll them in with all of your ill-informed rudeness about my B/W image. And you didn't even know how to clean the dirt specks off?????

1. The Conway depot image as it looked RIGHT OUT OF THE SCANNER. All I did was straighten & crop, clean the dust specks and use a very light application of the "Shadows/Highlights" feature. Had I known I would be breaking some sacred rules from the Rich Melvin editing bible, I would have begged your highness' permission to do so...

BTW: "little" is spelled with 2 Ls...


 



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/04/20 15:35 by santafe199.

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Well said Lance.
That statement by Rich, "I try to help someone improve their image quality and I'm a troll?" is pathetic. That post was just plain uncalled for. Nothing helpful about it and just plain BS. 

Don Winslow
Glendora, CA
http://www.donwinslow.net/Railroads

Rich,

RE: your harsh criticizm of Lance's photo: You are way out of line brother. You don't do that anymore than you would slam another guy's wife, worse, if you do it in front of him and worse yet, in public. 
BTW, I'd like to see your professional credentials if I please. I'm happy to state mine: 65 years of amateur and professional photography including 19 years as a police photographer. Published numerous times. Currently a volunteer fire photographer for Los Angeles County Fire Department.   

How about you?  BTW, how many 4X5 photos have you taken and processed?  With 25+ years as a photographer and lab technician I have a few under my belt. 

Have fun, be safe, stay well,

Bruce "Doc" Jones  Sierra Madre CA



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/20 13:57 by DocJones.

Interesting in that vacancies were protected off the Empori extra bd. Never gave that any thought.

sfbrkmn Wrote: > ...  Interesting in that vacancies were protected off the Emporia extra board ...

For me, it was an interesting diversion from the main line. And of course, deadheading to & from Abilene or Salina meant driving through Herington. I can honestly say a significant chunk of my Rock Island (and later on OKKT & SP/SSW) slides were taken while "earming" DH mileage from the Santa Fe payroll dept... ;^)

Lance

santafe199 Wrote:
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> sfbrkmn Wrote: > ...  Interesting in that
> vacancies were protected off the Emporia extra
> board ...
>
> For me, it was an interesting diversion from the
> main line. And of course, deadheading to & from
> Abilene or Salina meant driving through Herington.
> I can honestly say a significant chunk of my Rock
> Island (and later on OKKT & SP/SSW) slides were
> taken while "earming" DH mileage from the Santa Fe
> payroll dept... ;^)
>
> Lance

And being paid car miles too !

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