I've been looking through my Kodachrome slide collection and experimenting with scanning them and thought I'd start a thread showing the colorful Short Line Incentive Per Diem cars that made the late 70's to early 80's so interesting. I've managed to get decent photos of just about every one that ever rode the rails during this period and most of the variations that some roads had. We'll start off with a few A's and I'll add more as time permits. If you have any to share, please feel free to add what you have.
Ann Arbor (50ft)[
attachment=8160]Ashley Drew & Northern (8ft door)[
attachment=8159]Ashley Drew & Northern (10ft door cushion underframe)[
attachment=8158]Ahnapee and Western Railway (16ft double door cushion underframe)[
attachment=8157]Arkansas & Louisiana Missouri (60ft cushion underframe)[
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Atlantic & Western (rebuilt 50ft)[
attachment=8167]
Atlantic & Western (50ft XF) Although this was originally a Hutchinson Northern (ex-HN 3052) IPD car, it had already been reassigned to the ATW when I caught it[
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Will add some "B" and "C" cars next time.
Some really nice photos !!
Being old, and of the "carve it from stone, era of pictures", how can one 'scan' color slides, and have them come out as if taken with a digital camera in the first place. I have slides that I'd like to convert to digital files, so I could "play" with them.
Sumpter250 Wrote:Some really nice photos !!
Being old, and of the "carve it from stone, era of pictures", how can one 'scan' color slides, and have them come out as if taken with a digital camera in the first place. I have slides that I'd like to convert to digital files, so I could "play" with them.
Thanks! Plenty more where these came from along with many photos of short line power on many now abandoned short lines.
As for scanning the slides. I'm using an HP ScanJet G4010, that has a special tray in the lid that holds 5 - 35mm slides at one time. It's also supposed to be able to scan negatives, but I have never tried that.
The scanner comes with a pretty nice, simple program that allows you to pick out each slide, enlarge it, crop it and then save it or as I do; send the scan to another graphics program, where I can crop it and clean the image up some.
It's very time consuming, averaging probably 10 minutes or so to complete one image. So far, I can't get the scans to come close to the quality of the original slide or anything like today's digital images, but over all they aren't too bad. A more expensive, higher quality scanner might produce better results, but for the most part, I'll just go with the slides and scan images as I go through my collection and see what I can get.
Haven't looked in to it, but there are probably services available that might do a much better job then I've been able to do, but then you're no doubt talking some big bucks to get over 1200 slides converted!
I love the quality of the digital images, but man oh man I miss the good old Kodachrome 25/65 slides!
FCIN Wrote:I'm using an HP ScanJet G4010, that has a special tray in the lid that holds 5 - 35mm slides at one time.
I just might have to look into one of those, or an equivalent.
There was a time when all I shot was color slides. great for viewing on a screen, but of little use, now, without a scanner to put them into digital format.
WOW - what a great, and very useful resource this will be - maybe one of the mods could make it "sticky"
Sumpter250 Wrote:There was a time when all I shot was color slides. great for viewing on a screen...
If you're like me, you're about half scared to fire up the projector for fear of the bulb burning out and not being able find a replacement!
Here's a few more to add to the collection today. I've realized that it's going to take some time to go through my entire slide collection and fish out the IPD cars, so for now, I'm just going through a box of duplicate slides and posting what is in that. As time permits, I'll go through the entire collection and post others, hopefully without duplicating anything.
Here are two variations of East Camden & Highland box cars (EACH is one of my favorites):
East Camden & Highland 50ft cushion underframe sliding door[
attachment=8191]East Camden & Highland 60ft cushion underframe plug door[
attachment=8190]Green Mountain 50ft cushion underframe[
attachment=8189]Genesse and Wyoming 50ft sliding door[
attachment=8188]Greenville & Northern 50ft cushion underframe sliding door[
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Here are three types of cars operated by one of my favorite short lines, the Louisville New Albany & Corydon Railroad (Corydon, IN)
This is one of their first IPD cars and in their original paint scheme with the map of Indiana. 40ft box with a 6ft sliding door no less[
attachment=8200]As they added more cars to the fleet, they adopted this standarized paint scheme and logo, and here's another 40ft box in that scheme, also with a 6ft sliding door[
attachment=8198]Like a few other short lines, when the IPD craze started, LNAC initially fielded a fleet of 40ft box cars, which as you can guess, there was little demand for 40ft cars and most of these wound up being stored until they were finally scrapped. So they finally began to field 50ft cars and among their fleet were these 50ft all-door box cars which they called "Side-Slider's"[
attachment=8197]Elsewhere in my collection I have shots of their other 50ft box cars, but will have to post them later.
More to come later!