It’s a big, big world T
here is no doubt about it. Today’s mainline locomotives are large, powerful machines, as any- one who has ever had a chance to stand next to a 4,400 horsepower GE ES44 or a 4,000 h.p. EMD SD70 knows. Both models stand over 15 feet tall and over 70 feet long. EMD’s SD90
model is even larger, measuring just over 80 feet in length. Freight cars, too, are bigger and heavier than their counterparts of a generation or two ago. Size, however, needs to be put into perspective. As someone who grew up in New Jersey, I mainly associated railroading with cramped industrial areas and urban corridors, or small towns and tightly-treed rights-of-way. Indeed, railfanning some of my favorite lines in central New Jersey often seemed to be a constant struggle to find an open view of the tracks not hemmed in by vegetation. Now, however, I live in Colorado and frequently face a different challenge – photographing in landscapes where the train may be a mile or more away. The landscapes through which railroads travel here seem to be on an entirely different scale. In this environment, even the largest of locomotives and rolling stock can seem insignificant. The Union Pacific’s famous Moffat Route begins its westbound climb from Denver toward the con- tinental divide in earnest near Big Ten Curve, where the nearly-vertical rock formations known as the Flatirons suddenly jut skyward, marking the entrance to the Rocky Mountains. The Moffat Route was conceived in the late 1800’s by the businessmen of Denver, most notably David Moffat, who want- ed a direct rail route from their growing city west to Salt Lake City and the Pacific. At the time, any westbound rail traffic from Denver had to go north to Cheyenne on the Union Pacific or south to Pueblo on the Denver & Rio Grande. Thus the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific Railway was formed and after numerous surveys and a few false starts of construction, the present-day route following South Boulder Canyon was selected. Lacking the finances for a long tunnel under the continental di- vide, the railroad had to settle for a route up and over Rollins Pass. The DN&P’s successor, the Denver & Salt Lake, later built the Moffat Tunnel to replace the often snow-covered Rollins Pass, and after the D&RGW bought control of the D&SL in 1931, it built a connection between it’s mainline and the Moffat Tunnel route forming today’s route, which in now owned by the Union Pacific. Construction began in 1902 on the line that would eventually be described as “through the Rockies, not around them.” The pair of sweeping ten degree curves known as Little Ten and Big Ten curves was necessary to keep the grade below two percent as the line gains elevation at the base of the Flatirons. From the hillside above Big Ten Curve, one can see a train approaching from more than five miles
away, with downtown Denver visible on the horizon some twenty-five miles to the southeast. This is the type of location that puts the size of these man-made machines and their cargo in a different perspective. In the expansive landscape below, a mile-long unit coal train snaking through the curves takes on the appearance of a shoestring. The train is almost lost in the vastness of the scenery and dwarfed by the magnitude of the surrounding mountains. One of my favorite photographs from this area shows a Union Pacific locomotive rounding a curve heading eastbound away from the mountains. This particular train is made of up around 100 loaded hoppers hauling well over 10,000 tons of coal from the heart of the rocky mountains toward a Midwest- ern power plant. Five GE AC4400CW’s, each 73 feet long and weighing over 200 tons, slowly guide the train through the tight curves. And yet despite its size, the lead locomotive is reduced to an insignificant speck against the massive rocky backdrop of Blue Mountain rising up from beyond the roadbed. The peak of Blue Mountain is just over 8,900 feet above sea level, making it 2,300 feet higher than track level at this point. In HO scale (1:87) the mountain peak would tower 26 feet over track level – that would be almost three stories of landscaping! Even in Z-scale the peak would be 10 feet above the roadbed, a full story higher. No trivial task, and certainly unrealistic on most layouts. As the accompanying photograph shows, real railroads operate through landscapes so enormous and vast that they cannot possibly be recreated indoors under normal circumstances. What we intuitively think looks right or proportional on a layout may often be shortchanging the true scale of Mother Na- ture. That doesn’t mean, however, that mountainous rail lines or other large-scale scenes cannot be suc- cessfully modeled. Rather, it simply means that modelers need to look at their work with the eyes of an artist and carefully choose the compromises they need to make to create the illusion of reality. If the sole focus is on the train, it is easy to overlook how it fits in to the broader scene. By stepping
back, we can gain a different perspective on the railroad and its relative place in the big, big world through which it runs. NICHOLAS D’AMATO
40
photography/NICHOLAS D’AMATO MAY 2013
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100