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Most of the photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs, 20 to 200 megabytes in size) from the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) Many were digitized by LOC contractors using a Sinar studio back. They are adjusted by your webmaster for contrast and color in Photoshop before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here.
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In the Shop: 1942
Submitted by Dave on Wed, 08/08/2007 - 11:33pm.
Chicago & North Western railroad locomotive shops at Chicago. December 1942. View full size. 4x5 Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano.
RR shop
Submitted by George F on Wed, 08/22/2007 - 1:53pm.
Dreimer, Lucky for you to have experienced working on these magnificent iron machines. I managed to help clean & polish N&W 611's main rods when she came through my town of Danville IL. It was my way of paying her back for all the great trips I had behind her in the previous yrs. And I was really happy to get a chance to work on her.
I was lucky enough to learn
Submitted by dreimer on Fri, 08/10/2007 - 1:46pm.
I'm fairly young to have that knowledge, but I worked as a teenager in a "Locomotive Works" shop that specialized in maintaining the last of these machines. I worked in the foundry, and also learned how to cast all manner of things in brass, iron, copper, etc...
One of the main customers was the Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge Railway...in fact ALL of the "Journal Box Covers" were made by me, as well as a good portion of the luggage rack brackets in the passenger cars...all brass.
Steam Tech
Submitted by Lost World on Thu, 08/09/2007 - 8:50pm.
Another great Delano photo. Notice all the blurred ghost men tending the engines. There used to be thousands of them...now there are only a handful of men in the country with the knowledge to maintain steam locomotives. Amazing how quickly the technology vanished.
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Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.
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Today's Top 5