Looks quite pleasant and modern from outside. India, meanwhile, flirted with trams in multiple cities in the past but after independence,only two survived; one in Mumbai and one in Calcutta. The former was shutdown many decades ago but the latter still runs. It used to have ~70 km of tram lines once in it's heyday but slowly things got shuttered down and only around ~15 km, I guess remain. I have visited Calcutta, but sadly couldn't find trams running on popular routes so as to get a ride in one of them.
A window of opportunity opens, as a east passes the crew of the "Lone Pine Local", making up its train. SP Mojave Yard, Mojave CA.
A classic SP pumpkin boom truck, seen here at the siding at Ansel. Between Rosamond and Mojave CA. Long ago.
Yours truly, up on the roof of EX SP Sunset Limited dining car 10212 on a cold windy afternoon a few months ago. I was installing a screen over the kitchen exhaust vent to keep the racoons from crawling in and getting stuck in the duct work. Don't want to have to pull the ducting apart to recover any more ripe coon remains.
acptulsa posted a different version of this image over on the Santa Fe old photos thread. It works well in this thread as well. Photo by Jack Delano taken in Chicago during WWII. From the Library of Congress collection.
Fantastic find! My eye for details did see something odd - the number plate under the headlight on the smokebox door reads "5266", while the number boards and the road number on the tender are all 3266. And what's that dark blue square between the cylinder and the air tank?
That is really a 3. Different style of lettering (Some rail fans call it a font but that is really only a correct term if used in printed material like type setting, type writers and computer printing.) The blue flag is to signal "Men At Work" and must be removed after checking that everyone is clear before the train can be moved. https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/fra_net/105/TR_Blue_Safety_Flag_final.pdf
In that typeface/font/lettering (potato, tomato, the veggie pronunciation thing) the sole difference between a 3 and a 5 is how the top swish and the bottom part are connected. I suppose I saw a 5 for the same reason people saw canals on Mars through a telescope... I really need a better telescope... There wouldn't happen to be a Martian somewhere in the photo, would it? That would explain a lot. I know about the blue flag thing, but its comparatively intense color in that image looks completely out of place in the muted tones of the rest of the image. Like it was added or if it was an image artifact of some sort. Just plain weird. Maybe it's the Martians again.
It is the Kodachrome that Jack Delano was shooting back then. He was an early champion of the stuff and was pioneering in that regard. That and the exposure tinkering I did in Photo Shop to illuminate the shadows. The original high resolution TIFF image that I downloaded from the Library of Congress has a lot of "information" that can be tinkered with to bring out different details.
