A number of folks have mentioned the shorpy.com photo site, and someone (sorry, can’t remember who) posted a picture from there of the Bensenville, IL CNW yard, from 1943. The first thing that smacked me between the eyes, was how absolutely grundgy everything was! Everything (and I do mean everything - even vegetation!) was coated with soot and dirt. After perusing (and downloading) a bunch of the pictures there, I’ve come to the conclusion that those of us who model the transition era are totally inadequate when it comes to “weathering” our cars. Heck, we can still see what colors the cars were originally!
Anyhow, it’s something to think about… Try clicking on the link above, explore the photos, and let us know what you think…
Steam locos are/were dirty animals. Heck, my recent ride on the Durango and Silverton left me covered in soot after spending time in the “covered” gondola car.
And first gen diesels weren’t exactly clean beasts either.
1943 is not a good year to make generallizations from, as it was toughest year of WWII - there was even a question at that time if the Allies would win. Every effort went strictly into supporting the war effort, and everything was on a make do basis.
After the war, many things got attention. Take a look at the films shot in the 1950s; and things are A LOT cleaner.
Actually I have a number of books/photos showing much equipment in the 50’s being very clean.
During WWII the railroads were under great presure to keep supplies moving, things did fall into disrepair and got very dirty. But after the war, the war profits were used for lots on defered maintenence and equipment upgrades. The early 50’s was a time of much new equipment and good maintenence for the most part.
AND, there is a difference between dirt, which railroading has always been a dirty business, and deterioration - which has been rampant since the sixties, but was not so much so in the 50’s or even before.
You are welcome to do as you like, but I will keep most of my weathering light for my modeled time of 1953.
While yard environs were indeed very dirty in appearance during the steam era, don’t be misled into believing that most rolling stock was as well. Cars were repainted at very regular, relatively short, intervals and rarely looked even half as bad as the equipment that plies the rails today. And beware of period B&W photos, as the film’s response to various colors and relative contrasts was often decidedly off and thus highly misleading.
What you did see were very dull, flat, finishes to most cars resulting from a rapid chalking of the paint. However, look at the cars’ lettering and you’ll typically find it bold and clear, right down to the smallest lettering. I have a couple of early WWII era color photos of yards showing many dozens of cars of all types, all relatively clean looking, even then.
The same was largely true of the road locomotives. During the first half of the last century both the railroads themselves, as well as an engine crews, normally took pride in the appearance of their motive power. Most were very well maintained and I’ve seen a couple of illustrations in books showing absolutely spotless steam engines with highly polished domes and brass appurtenances as late as the 1940’s. It was only toward the very end of steam that locomotives were let go and became abused looking, rusty, hulks.
I certainly wouldn’t argue that B&W photos can occasionally be found showing rolling wrecks and absolutely filthy locos and cars from that era, but that is not what the railroads’ equipment typically looked like. Also, always keep in mind when examining old photos that many of the photographers who photographed railroad scenes before mid century were true artists and their images were designed to convey a mood, or feeling, rather than simply to document a scene. So…employ care in your model weathering, for as it is, too many of
I suppose a fella could do a bit o’ both? If he wanted to depict a 1943 setting for a few weeks, or just an imaging session, he could haul out the ‘overdone’ items and give them their due. Then, when he tired of that much more grungy look, he could jump forward to 1953 or something and substitute the much more subtly weathered rolling stock and engines.
Nice photo, Cudaken, but just exactly what year does it date from? Being a color photo, odds are that its very near the end of the steam era (late 50’s), when deferred maintenance of steam locos became the universal rule.
Even at that I see mostly dirt, grime, spills, normal minor leaks, stains, etc. - I don’t see much or any rust, deterioration, damage, peeling or rusted through paint, etc.
Seems like most of us agree and the evidence supports the view that from the 50’s and back, things were kept in better shape than today.
I remember the 40’s and 50’s, my dad was an engineer for Santa Fe in yard service. He wore bib overalls and my mother had a clean pair every day for him to wear to work that day. He would come home at the end of his shift and look like a dirt bag. Off came the overalls on the enclosed back porch and into the washing machine. About wore mom out with the laundry.
On the other hand, I went to work with him a few times during those years, and I still remember dad with a handful of cotton waste wiping everything down on the mikado he had for a switch engine at Enid OK and making everything as clean as possible. He did not allow anyone to smoke or chew and spit in “his cab”. When the diesels came and the steam went away, he switched to kakie (sp) pants and a work shirt, but still got pretty dirty. The same housekeeping took place on the diesel. It was during those days that I got to “run” my first diesel down the mainline heading to a grain elevator to pull loads. What a thrill. After that, I got several chances at the throttle as Enid was on a branch line and officials were scarce except for the agent who knew dad well and I was able to “run” the engine, but never with cars coupled on.
While in college in mid and late 50’s I worked summers as an extra board car clerk, meaning I spent a lot of time in the yards walking tracks and recording numbers among other duties. The cars were rather dull as CNJ mentioned, but they still looked better than some I see today. No graffetti except for a few chalk drawings or marks. After graduating from seminary I moved to Kansas to take a church, and ended up also working at the GOB in Topeka to supplement income. That led to many trips down to the shops to see what was going on, that was a dirty place, and after Santa Fe sent me to IBM school, it led to a second career in computer programming and systems.
As long as we are on the subject, it might be useful to inform today’s hobbyists how really inaccurate much of yesteryear’s photographic record can be with regards to its being the basis for “accurately” weathering models.
Early 20th century B&W films were very deficient in red sensitivity and even when supposedly panchromatic film was introduced, it still had color shift/sensitivity problems. Then, too, many photo hobbyists did their own developing and printing, resulting in all sorts of “artsy”, or accidental, distortions. The contrast shift due to the film’s various bias in sensitivity, as well as the subject’s lighting angles, often conspired to create all manner of distortions in the surface appearance of freight cars and locos.
Color print film for public use started appearing in the very late 1930’s, but here too all the colors were a bit inaccurate and since most color film was being commercially processed, the photographer-hobbyist lost much of the control over the final printed image. Under exposure was very common, as was excessive contrast. Even after color transparency film became widely available in the early 1950’s, color rendition, although better than with print film, was still often questionable. Cudaken’s posted image clearly suffers from vignetting and under exposure, both of which could enhance the prominence of the locomotive’s dirt and grime. Incidentally, photographs of U.S. RR facilities and equipment was pretty much prohibited during WWII (sorta like today, huh?), so actual WWII era RR photos are quite rare.
Further, as I pointed out upstream, many railroad photographers of the period were not documentarians as much as they were artists and they purposely skewed the appearance of their photos to tell a story, or create a mood (this is an especially big problem with some Depression Era WPA photographers’ cityscape work).
I can´t really reflect on how the US had it in the 30´s or 40´s, but I know for a fact that even if the depression came during the 30´s, there had been a war only one and a half decade earlier. The state of things weren´t all that “happy” as we have had in the period after WW2.
My family has been documenting the life around us for the last 90 years, and looking at the photos from the 30´s and 40´s there was a general state of “disrepair” all over. The only buildings that looks new was the ones that actually was just that!
Sure enough there wasn´t as much rust back then as there was later, but that must be because the lead paints used then was better than the newer stuff [:D].
Another thing to ponder about, you can´t really judge how “dirty” the RR related buildings were by remembering how nice the suburb where you lived looked. Even today there is a major difference between industrial areas Vs. residential. Add to that a large amount of soot and other contaminants, and you have a totally different situation.
An hour spent on rr-fallenflags.org would be instructive. The photos are dated, and their subjects should be able to tell a story of sorts. As John says, there were some serious photogs, mostly amateurs, whose hobby was photographing trains, perhaps collecting is a better term, and that means in imagery. You’ll see all kinds of states of cleanliness and age in those images.
What we don’t know is when a given engine was last cleaned, shopped, or when it was first erected. It stands to reason that an older engine, perhaps on its last assignment, would not be expecially well kept. At the same time, an older engine newly sent out of shops should look pretty good.
But I would think hardworking drag engines, with the huge throughputs of both coal/oil and water over even a month, and with sanding, would look pretty grungy in short order.
Ignore Shorpy as a source; 90% of their photos are just lifts off of the Library of Congress website. In this context, look through EVERY color photo in the Farn Services Bureau photo collection:
Anyone who claims to model the “transition era” (actually, the late STEAM era of 1936-1949) really needs to STUDY these photographs. ALL OF THEM. For example:
The key point of interest in all of these photos is the relatively large level of grime. Modelers don’t weather their steam-era equipment enough! I don’t mean cartoonlike and generally inaccurate weathering like John Pryke or George Sellios, but realistic weathering as seen in these photos and thousands
There must have been some interesting weather patterns back then. Take a car pulled behind the loco Cudaken posted after a few months of drought and have it rain. The black streaks would of course look like the last post.
There always was something distinctly unusual about Chicago’s appearance, undoubtedly from its being the center of U.S. rail activity, that set it apart from other cities. From WWI onwards it was undoubtedly the filthiest city in America up through the end of the steam age and I’ve seen photos of downtown, with buildings even well removed from the yards, where it appears that the fronts had literally been sprayed with soot (look at Al Capone’s HQ, for instance)!
This definitely was not the situation in NYC, Albany, Boston, Hartford, or Washington D.C. during the same period; all locations that I was familiar with at the time. I grew up and travell
