Indiana Harbor Belt RR, switch engine in yard near Calumet park stockyards, Calumet City (near Chicago), Ill.

Jan. 1943; photographer: Jack Delano; Library of Congress: Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Collection; Original digital image at Library of Congress

Early Color Image by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin Gorskii

Using emerging technological advances in color photography, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) made numerous photographic trips to systematically document the Russian Empire. He conducted most of his visual surveys between 1909 and 1915, although some of his work dates as early as 1905. Library of Congress

Did you see the engineer in the picture:

Look closely, he really is there

More background info:

taken abt. 1910

Prokudin-Gorskii, Sergei Mikhailovich, 1863-1944, photographer.

The railcar in the background is thought to be Prokudin-Gorskii’s traveling photographic laboratory and living quarters.

album: Views in the Ural Mountains, survey of industrial area, Russian Empire

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsc.04424

Prokudin-Gorskii created his negatives by using a camera that exposed one oblong glass plate three times in rapid succession through three different color filters: blue, green, and red. For formal presentations, he printed positive glass slides of these negatives and projected them through a triple lens magic lantern. Prokudin-Gorskii would project the slide through the three lenses, and, with the use of color filters, superimpose the three exposures to form a full color image on a screen. lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/prokhtml/prokcolor.html

I like trains and pictures of old trains, particularly nice images of the steam locomotives. I can remember — barely — when some steam engines were still used on the Union Pacific.

I also like to find large old images where one can see a lot of detail when you look close. I’ve cropped this one several times to show all of the people in the image.

“Giant Bluff.” Elk Canyon on Black Hills and Ft. P. R.R.
A wood-burning locomotive with four cars, on a track below a cliff; several people are posing in front of the train.
1890.
Grabill, John C. H., photographer.
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsc.02546

One of the most recent instances in which the motor has been “put to work” is seen in the street cleaning wagon here shown, which is the product of the International Sanitary Street Cleaning Company, of 143 Liberty street, New York City.

This wagon is designed to complete in one operation the task of street cleaning, which it would seem to accomplish, for it sprinkles, sweeps and collects the dust at the same time. A row of sprinklers is arranged just forward of the rotary brush, which is located at the rear of the vehicle, and can be seen in the photograph resting on the road surface. This brush sweeps the dust onto a traveling conveyor, which deposits it in a compartment provided for the purpose within the body of the vehicle.

The motive power is supplied by a Trebert 2O-h. p., four cylinder vertical gasoline engine, set just forward of the front axle, and is delivered through a three speed gear box of the sliding gear type to a countershaft fitted with sprockets, and from these by chains to the rear wheels.

The driving wheels are forty inches in diameter, and are shod with steel ties four inches wide. Plain bearings are fitted throughout. Steering is effected by means of a “fifth wheel“-the front axle swinging on a king pin — which is operated by a large spur gear and pinion, controlled by a horizontal hand wheel of generous size beside the seat of the operator. The brush and dust collecting mechanism arc operated by chains, which run from a second set of sprockets on the rear hubs. The photograph shows very clearly the operating levers, brakes, the means of filling the water tank, and, at the side of the vehicle, the means of raising the brush from the street surface when not in use. The machine weighs about 5,000 pounds with tanks full, and is said to be capable of cleaning thirty miles of streets in ten hours.

– The Horseless Age; Volume XIV Number 18, New York, November 2, 1904