Images of the Midwestern Railroad Final Days.
It’s been nearly 18 years since Union Pacific absorbed the Chicago & North Western system. I was fortunate to have been in position to photograph C&NW in its final year of independence.
C&NW’s busiest route was its largely double-track Chicago-Council Bluffs mainline. Yet, long before C&NW was formally merged with UP, this route had functioned as an eastward extension of UP’s east-west mainline. In the early 1990s, many trains operated with UP run-through locomotives.
I found C&NW’s surviving secondary lines even more photogenic. Yet, these lines represented just a shadow of C&NW’s once sprawling empire. Many routes had been fragmented or abandoned. Once busy secondary mainlines, served as little more than lightly served freight feeders. Several C&NW operations had been physically isolated from its core network, with the railroad relying on haulage arrangements in place of its own lines.
C&NW held onto its identity into its last days. Its historic herald was still proudly displayed on equipment and infrastructure. Vestiges of its former greatness survived as visual cues to an earlier era. So its final year, C&NW retained these threads of corporate continuity. While the appearance of C&NW continued for a while under Union Pacific operation, once it was part of the UP system, these threads were less meaningful.
I made roughly a thousand C&NW images between June 1994 and May 1995 (UP’s intended merger date in late April 1995 was ultimately postponed a few weeks, despite reports to the contrary). These are just a sampling of those efforts.
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Thanks Brian, Kodachrome 25 photos are always interesting, and become more interesting as they mature and time goes on
Perhaps, I should clarify: in this instance f1.8 105mm describes the lens, rather than the specific exposure. I have several Nikkon 105mm lenses, one was a heavy 105 f.8 lens (used in the C&NW photo), others include an f2.5 105mm. My actual exposure on the day of the C&NW photo was probably 1/250th of second at f5.6 (rather than wide open at f1.8). Sorry about the confusion. Brian Solomon
A pair of DASH8-40c on a westward ”freight” at Arcadia, is it coal, taking with f1.8 105mm, was it a fixed lens Brian, Kodachrome25, interesting photo, f1.8 wouldnd give great dept of field, but works well in that photo.