Eastbound BNSF stack train races out of Spokane in the failing late December light.
Blair Kooistra, photographer: Old forty-foot Northern Pacific boxcars loaded to their 50 ton capacity with wheat clomp across a rural grade crossing near Creston, Washington, bound east on the CW local returning to the mainline at Cheney. High-capacity hopper cars have just about done in the movement of wheat in boxcars in the west; in a few years, such scenes will cease to exist.
From Railpictures. Photographer Blair Kooistra says of this photo:
While trains detoured around the south end of the lake via Union Paciifc’s former Western Pacific, Southern Pacific work crews valiantly regained the route across the Great Salt Lake foot by foot in the summer 1986 after storms and high water washed away the railroad. While work trains dumped “armor rock” and gravel from either end to restore the roadbed, it was earth movers and maintenance workers who raised the rock fill and brought the washed-away tracks back into alignment. On the western portion of the lake between Lakeside and Strongknob, a work crew contemplates their next move.
Feb. 28, 1966: This image of wreckage from Pennsylvania Station’s original facade was published in The New York Times on several occasions. It helped create a law establishing the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Ada Louise Huxtable of The Times described this site in Seacaucus, N.J., containing 25 centuries of debris from New York, as a “pretty classy dump” of classical culture, style and elegance — “a setting of macabre surrealist vérité.” Photo: Eddie Hausner/The New York Times
Where Finch sleeps, Palouse, WA.
Marshall, Washington.
Western Steam no. 17: Union Pacific passenger special, Medicine Bow, Wyoming by Joel Jensen (first discovered in his book Steam: An Enduring Legacy).
A short Washington & Idaho Railway freight trundles over two of the few remaining rails left on the Palouse. Near Belmont, Washington, mid-December, 2011.
As it happens, my buddy Joel P. King was at the throttle on this one.
The old Palouse & Lewiston in the canary grass by the E. Whittier Road crossing, Spokane County, Washington.
Blair Kooistra’s picture of a westbound Milwaukee Road freight rumbling over the concrete arch viaduct in Rosalia, Washington. Here’s a view of the viaduct as it exists now.
