Growing up in a steam era railway town, I noticed the condition of anything railway as we cut through the yards on our way to school (watching out for cinder dicks) well everything was dirty, grimy, oily, sooty, smudged, smelly, discolored, this was everything, engines, buildings, equipment, coalsheds, handrails, even the staff were grimy (in the shops) Soot, smoke, steam, stepping in oil and grease was a constant problem, this note is in contrast to some layouts where everything is shiny, bright, tidy, just as it came out of the box, these are comments and not meant to stir up arguments, I’m not complaining about the “dirt” just remembering how it was.
I agree and many don’t.
I remember when I was a youngster standing under an open deck bridge span and looking up so I could see what the bottom of a steam engine looked like - I got a face full of that dirt and grim and still to this day haven’t seen the bottom of a steam engine! [(-D]
Tried standing on an overpass to see the top of a steam engine - similar results!
But - still good memories of those days. [tup]
The www is full of images of railroading going back decades. Fallenflags.org, for example, has images, mostly black and white, from the 50’s on back. It is hard to tell because of the B&W, but a heavy preponderance of engines were clearly well used and quite grimy and scaled.
This was true, generally, of freight engines. Passenger service engines, on the other hand, were much less gungy. The roads wanted the public to feel that their transportation was important to the railroad, so they kept the varnish in good shape, looking good, and that applied to the engines.
It’s not to say passenger engines always looked clean…not true. By the end of a hard day’s work, they needed to be cleaned if they were to look as they did at start of day.
-Crandell
Most just want their equipment to stay clean and/or aren’t comfortable with weathering. Others want the equipment to hold value so leave things as is. It’s their RR and they can do what they want with it.
When I was kid, we lived 5 houses away from the Grand Trunk Railway line in Chicago.
Whenever I would hear the steam whistle blowing, I would run out into the back yard to see the train go by. My mother ran out there too, but not to see the train. She was out there to retrieve the laundry hanging on the clothes line before the soot descended upon us.
Aww…and here I thought engineers had a special cover for the smoke stack for when their engines went past rowhouses and tenaments where laundry would have been on the lines. I think that’s pretty thoughtless of all those engine designers…don’t you?
[(-D]
It could have been a passenger train, and someone flushed the toilet. I have heard that happened to many fishermen who anchored their boats under a trestle… [oops][xx(]
Thanks, George -
You just made me feel a whole lot better about not seeing the bottom of the train.[swg]
I never thought of that!
My dad learned the hard way not to fish under a trestle when a cattle train went over head.[xx(][:O]
Guys, may I remind you all that this very subject was kicked around and around less than two weeks ago and the final conclusion was that the degree of grit and grime in the steam era was highly dependent on the railroad, the particular geographic location involved and what year was being cited. This was in large part due to smoke abatement laws and how a given road regarded smoke production. Most east coast cities had laws in place early in the steam era and the urban centers remained quite clean. Chicago, on the other hand, seemingly lacking such laws, was probably the filthiest city in America.
Likewise, most of the eastern railroads were very conscious of the appearance of their motive power and maintained it to a high degree. RR business departments often felt projecting a clean and well maintained image was critical in attracting/keeping shippers, in a time when the freight business was shifting to over the road trucking. The same was true of the rollingstock, but for somewhat different reasons.
What you see in the way of totally run down, over-weathered, structure modeling, exemplified by that widely admired and well known northeastern layout, is pretty much just fantasy…although the naive take it to be historically accurate. RR equipment and buildings should indeed show clear evidence of weathering, not be raw plastic, but there is currently a tendency to go way overboard, such that everything becomes just caricature.
I will add that the filthiest locomotives I ever saw, bar none, were the diesels of the New Haven shortly before the merger. For many it was completely impossible to see any road name on them and their body colors were pretty much indistinguishable because of the heavy layer of dirt and grime over the entire engine!
CNJ831
My most up close and personal experience with a steam loco was running my brother-in-law’s live-steam Atlantic. I think it was 1 1/2" to the foot scale and coal fired. Anyway, I balanced on a little flat car and opened the throttle. I made it 2 laps around his back yard railroad before my glasses were opaque with oily, sooty grime and my face was similarly treated. The white T shirt I was wearing was never white again.
If one little steam engine can make that kind of mess, I can only imagine what a real railroad town must have been like.