The Railroad Commissary dining car


Huge on-line catalog of authentic china patterns


94 in stock


www.RRCommissary.com The Clover Leaf Route


•silverware • used books


mented. Enough passenger car plans, rosters, maps, and Pullman financials to satisfy even the mildly curious. Available by mail or at better hobby shops.


"The Clover Leaf Route” is the forgot- ten railroad into St. Louis. Merged into the Nickel Plate in the early 1920s, the St. Louis extension was often over- looked. This 176 page issue looks at the Clover Leaf and its early opera- tions, along with dozens of photos, maps, interlocking and station pho- tos. The transformation of the route into the Nickel Plate and its relation- ship with the TRRA is well docu-


Price: $40 plus $5 postage TRRA Historical and


Technical Society, Inc. P.O. Box 1688, St. Louis, MO 63188-1688 (314) 535-3101 (evenings) trra-hts.railfan.net


•menus Railfan Cameras 600 items


HAVE YOU EVER GIVEN ANY THOUGHT to how railfan


photography and cameras have


changed over the years? With today’s sophis- ticated, all-automatic cameras, about all you need do is be trackside with a good eye for composition. But it was not always this easy to take train pictures. This month, I thought it would be fun to reminisce a bit on what railfan photography was like in years past.


Very Early Cameras Photography dates back to the early 1800s, but with exposure times of up to several minutes the Daguerreotype, Calotype, Am- brotype, and Tintype (Ferrotype) processes were suitable only for use by professionals in portrait studios; train photography (even if there had been any railfans back then) would have been next to impossible. By the 1860s, the improved, but still laborious, wet plate process with a cumbersome camera us- ing glass plates coated with wet emulsion had dropped exposures to a few “quick” sec- onds. Probably the first train photographs were by Civil War photographers like Math- ew Brady taking wet plate “views” of war damaged rail facilities, locomotives and cars, working out of a cramped portable darkroom full of supplies and glass plates that might break as the wagon bounced along rutted roads.


By the 1870s the dry glass plate process


was a little easier, and the first celluloid sheet film became available in 1888. But most train photos were still taken by com- mercial photographers, hired to capture im- ages of trains and impressive landmarks for advertisements. Also in use were stereo cameras using two side-by-side lenses. View- ing the photos in a hand held stereo viewer


giving a 3-D effect was a popular form of en- tertainment (probably the equivalent of to- day’s railfan slide and digital image shows). By the end of the 1800s, cameras were small and easy to handle, designed for fami- ly snapshots and could take multiple shots on that newfangled “Kodak roll film” (called “shotgun” film because it resembled a shot- gun shell) invented by George Eastman. The Kodak Brownie box camera (originally made of cardboard) of 1900 and made into the 1960s took 2½ inch square pictures on medi- um format 117 roll film. You looked down in- to the viewfinder while moving the camera to get a good composition, then carefully pressed the shutter lever to avoid shaking the camera with the one shutter speed of ¹⁄₄₀ of a second, wound the film to the next frame, and then sent the finished roll back to Kodak in Rochester, New York for devel- oping and 2½ inch circular prints. (Can you imagine railfanning with a Brownie box camera? B&W photographer Richard Stein- heimer’s first camera was a Baby Brownie Special, producing 3″×5″ prints on 127 film.) Other cameras of the time were folding cameras with a collapsible bellows to allow focusing, and some had blazing fast shutter speeds as fast as ¹⁄₁₅₀ of a second. This author has a 1913 patent date “1-A Kodak Junior” folder with shutter speeds of ¹⁄₂₅, B, ¹⁄₅₀ and ¹⁄₁₀₀, and apertures of ƒ/7.7 to ƒ/45. With care, ¹⁄₁₀₀ was maybe sufficient to get reasonably sharp hand-held photos of stationary or slow-moving trains.


The lenses on most of these early cameras were pretty good, but lacked lens coatings so were subject to image degrading flare, and many were not sharp away from the center until stopped down a few apertures. Never-


Although not railfans,early photographers liked to photograph trains along with their other subjects, such as wet plate “views” of Civil War damaged rail facilities, track, locomotives and cars. Photo courtesy of Stock Photo Division, Finley-Holiday Film Corp.


12 JANUARY 2014 • RAILFAN.COM


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