Railfanning the Kansas City area (1960-1970) - MRH Theater Video

...look an awful lot like a model railroad! 

My favorite scene is the tow truck lifting up the dump truck dumping into the portible conveyor. This would make a great model railroad scene. Nobody would believe it.

Tom

I would belive it as I have actually been the truck driver in the very same scene one summer during the wheat harvest in southern Kansas.

Some guys with three or four semis with grain trailers had set up a location so that the farmers wouldn't have to make the full 30 mile trip to the grain elevator and could get back to the fields to continue thier harvesting that much sooner.

Lucky for me the truck I was in had a dump bed so they didn't have to pick up my truck but the guy in front of me was swaying in the wind with a truck almost twice the size of mine as I pulled up.

The way those cables were strecthed  I don't think they were going to last the full harvest season and really didn't trust them to be used on my boss's truck, (you know the rule, you break it, you bought it, and I didn't have the cash to buy that truck).

Dale B.

What got me is the set of Boxcars that are set up on this tall concrete bases and they looked like they were being used as storage sheds/bins. That would be neat to model.

I was amazed to see a few scenes of red & silver "warbonnet" F consists leading freight trains.  Being from the East Coast, I always believed those were only used on passenger trains (different gear ratios, etc.)...

Very high quality video work for that period, it rivals anything Emery Gulash ever did!

ditto: using SF F units on freights. I always thought they were passenger only.

Amazing variety of shots. Thanks for posting this! It was really entertaining and educational.

Chris

My wifes uncle the late Lin Crum took the pictures from 1964 to 1970. Lin and I used to go railfanning around the Pittsburgh area in the 70's. He was a career army soldier so he travelled around to get the train pictures. The slides where on the shelf in my closet for about 10 years and Joe suggested to post them for everone to see. Joe got me on to digmypics.com to convert the slides. I highly recommend them to do the service. Hope you enjoy.

Tom Wilson

I noticed that A-B-B-A set on the freight, too, but figured it was just something to do with all those surplus F-units as passenger service was on the outs. Running them like that would not pose problems except they couldn't pull as much as freight F's and couldn't achieve their top speeds in freight service. As long as they didn't mix them with freight power the gearing wouldn't be an issue. This is about the only way Santa Fe could use them until the CF7 program turned them into road switchers.

Now there was one train that was pretty famous in the 60's which was called the Super C; it was a hotshot piggyback express between Chicago and LA. It always ran with warbonnet passenger F's because they were the only power that could keep up to the schedule. I don't think that the train in the photo was that hot, though.

Those are cool pics.. not at all my "prototype region" but interesting.

However, I don't really feel the flash movie format is good for this sort of thing, even "extra large". Pixelated images just don't do it for me. I hope MRH theater sticks to movies and leaves still photos for a more appropriate format. Maybe I have just been spoiled by all the excellent images available on the net these days.

I dont wan't to appear ungrateful, I appreciate the sharing, just wish they were regular jpg images.

Regards,

Chris

I started with the Mopac in the 1970's and KC was my headquarters for a year.  Remember the local railroaders nicknamed the KCS the 'haywire' due to their (light) rail used in earlier years. 

Was fun to see the Milwaukee and Frisco again, the KCS and Milwaukee shared a yard north of Mopac Neff Yard.