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Galesburg Ghost Spooks Silver Splendor?

Is there a ghost haunting Tracking the Light?

Last week, reader Wayne Duffett asked about the ghost in my photograph of Budd Vista dome Silver Splendor that had appeared in my post titled Spring Classic Trains Silver Issue.

Ghost?

Indeed, a spectral face appeared in one of the windows of the car as it paused at Galesburg, Illinois at the headend of Amtrak No. 4.

Upon closer inspection, I recognized the ghost as poet and author Carl Sandburg.

The ghost of Carl Sandburg?

Not really, no.

I recalled that when Amtrak No. 4 paused for its extended station stop at Galesburg in November 2018, I briefly disembarked to make photos of Silver Splendor on which I was traveling. Across the tracks from the train was a huge mural that featured icons of Galesburg, including an image of Burlington’s Budd-built Zephyr, and a portrait of the famous writer.

Perhaps the ghost of the Zephyr reflected in the Silver Splendor would have been more appropriate? Boo!

This is the photo where Wayne noticed a ghostly visage in the window of Silver Splendor. (Look beneath the letter ‘N’ in Burlington.
A much enlarged version of the photo in question.
This is another image that I made in Galesburg during the No. 4’s station stop in November 2018.
Here is an enlarged version of the mural. Notice the portrait of Carl Sandburg at center left. This was the source of the visage reflected in the window.

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Announcements, photography, Rail transit marathon, Tips and Technique

Spring Classic Trains—Silver Issue

The Spring 2025 Issue of Classic Trains is the magazine’s 25th Anniversary. To mark this publishing milepost, Editor Brian M. Schmidt created a Silver theme and asked me to write two features.

My article, ‘Philadelphia’s Ground Breaking Budd Silverliners’ starts on page 30, and features several of my father’s vintage Kodachrome images. On page 68, ‘Classics Today’, offers my personal story ‘Saving Silver Splendor’ that describes a cross-country journey with a former Burlington Budd-built Vista Dome on its way to becoming Conway Scenic Railroad’s Rhonda Lee, an event that ultimately led to my marketing position with the railroad.

Silver Splendor at Galesburg, Illinois on Amtrak train No.4 Southwest Chief in November 2018. This classic Budd dome was on its way east to the Conway Scenic Railroad where it would be renamed Rhonda Lee. I exposed this photo during a station stop using my first FujiFilm XT1. This is one of several photos of the car that appears in Spring 2025 Classic Trains.

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Steward Depot

The wee village of Steward, Illinois is located amongst a glade of trees where the old Burlington makes a sharp bend on its westward run between Aurora and Savanna—where the line reaches the Mississippi River.

Steward is just a few miles from the busy crossing at Rochelle, where the old Burlington crosses the very busy Union Pacific former Chicago & North Western east-west line between Chicago and the Omaha/Council Bluffs gateway.

Twenty-five years ago, I’d occasionally frequent Steward to photograph trains on Burlington Northern/BNSF.

A few weeks ago on our way east, Kris and I stopped briefly in the village of Steward to photograph the preserved former Burlington station there.

This was one of the railroad’s standard pattern stations, in other words a building using a standardized floor plan that was applied to many similar structures along the company’s lines.

It appears that the building was moved both across and away from the tracks since it last had served as the company’s station building at Steward. Notice the position of the bay window on the ‘wrong’ side of the building. As built, the bay window would have been on the track-side of most station buildings.

I made these images using my Lumix LX7 digital camera.

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Canadian National at Savanna.

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Scaled but unadjusted scan; no corrections to color, level, contrast etc.

Toward the end of an April 1995 trip along the Mississippi with Tom and Mike Danneman, we set up along the old Burlington near the famous Mississippi Palisades State Park in Savanna, Illinois.

The streamlined Twin Cities Zephyr was all but a memory.

However at that time Canadian National was exercising rights over Burlington Northern and routing 4-5 freights a day via this Mississippi River east-bank route to reach Chicago.

The light was fading when a nearly new CN DASH-9 approached us leading an eastward freight.

I exposed this Kodachrome 25 slide using my Nikon F3T fitted with a Nikkor f4 200mm lens. This photo has appeared in print several times over the years.

For presentation here and extract the maximum amount of information from the slide, I made a multi-pass scan using a Nikon Super Coolscan5000 digital scanner driven with VueScan software.

I selected ‘fine mode’ and made three samples to refine the scan and then imported the 119.8MB file into Lightroom for refinement, color correction, scaling and final presentation.

Adjusted scan.

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