Photographer Jack Delano recognized trains as an iconic feature of American cultural identity. Trains are central to American life; trains had long linked small communities to the outside world. This image conveys and celebrates the sheer mechanical power of these big machines. This one was traveling between Winslow and Seligman, Arizona, and stopped on a siding to cool its wheels after descending...
View of a Chicago & Northwestern Railroad freight departure yard at twilight in December 1942, possibly Proviso Yard in Chicago. In the lower foreground is a lighted switch stand, used to both control and display the status of a track switch. At upper left, the blurred form of a freight car moves away from the camera, while the movements of a worker carrying a lantern show up as squiggles of light...
Switchman on the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad demonstrating signal with a "fusee" at Calumet City, Illinois in January 1943. In the days before radio communications, train crews communicated with hand signals, and used fusees at twilight and dawn, when visibility is poor. This signal tells the locomotive engineer to "stop." Railroaders still use fusees in rare occasions.
Interior view of the Chicago & North Western Railway roundhouse at Proviso Yard in Chicago, Illinois, December 1942. The locomotive in the foreground is #2070, an M-1 class 0-6-0 used for yard switching and built by Alco-Schenectady in 1916. It was scrapped on February 17, 1947. Beside it is a larger freight locomotive, class Z 2-8-0 #1756, which was also built by Alco-Schenectady and operated...
Exterior, distant broadside view of steam locomotive pushing a train over the hump at the Chicago & North Western Railway's Proviso Yard in Chicago, December 1942. At the top of the hump, workers uncouple the cars, which roll down the other side of the hump via gravity. The hump towerman uses a complex array of switches to route the cars into different tracks, grouped by destination. For an...
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