Very strange things

[Erik_Mag]

Miningman

2)  Railroad of the Mystics. The door opens to Space Time. Cannot reveal the location. Not yet. Someday.

 

I think that's the Nevada Norther enginehouse in Cobre Nevada. The NNRR line between Shafter (former WP, now UP interchange) and Cobre (SP interchange) was torn up ca 1990.

Definitely a spot out in the middle of nowhere.

[M636C]

3) Presidente Peron, later Argentina design by LD Porta. A bit striking in all that streamlining and white finish.

 

This was a rebuild from a metre gauge Pacific following Chapelon's work converting Paris Orleans 4500 series Pacifics to 4700 (240A) and 240P class 4-8-0s.

So the diameter of the boiler was inherited from the locomotive rebuilt.

Peter

[scilover]

M636C

2)  Bizzaro World Locomotive. Steam? Diesel? Electric? Yes! 

Woah, I had to make a double take there when I saw this picture hahaha. I wonder why they made that decision to paint that....

[Miningman]

Peter-- Wow! Great post. Now that's a Pacific!! What a handsome locomotive, it would look great on the Canadian Pacific or the Pennsy. 

[M636C]

2)  Bizzaro World Locomotive. Steam? Diesel? Electric? Yes! 

 The lettering appears to read "125 Jahre Eisenbahn"

The actual steam locomotive (a kkstb Class 310) looks like:

In the limited space on the body of the Taurus locomotive, the artist has tried to include some critical images.

Peter

[SD70Dude]

The Porta engine reminds me of a T1.  But look at the knuckle!

[Flintlock76]

Oooooo, some goodies here!

Photo 1)  Talk about a deluxe doghouse!  That one puts anything the mighty PRR had on their "coast-to-coast" tenders to shame!  I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fridge and a hot-plate in there!

Photo 2)  Just goes to show you, "Steam Lives!"  Sort of.

Photo 3)  Was Maestro  Porta a hot dog fanatic?  The boiler on that thing reminds me of a hot dog sitting on a bun!  Maybe there's a side of fries and a beer in the tender?

Hey, we all like hot dogs, don't we?  

[Miningman]

1)  Doghouse on a Vanderbilt tender.  Now if we had one of these today you could sell raffle tickets for $200 bucks apiece to railfans to get the seat! You bet! 

 

2)  Bizzaro World Locomotive. Steam? Diesel? Electric? Yes! 

 

3) Presidente Peron, later Argentina design by LD Porta. A bit striking in all that streamlining and white finish.

[Flintlock76]

Number Three looks like the "Rustoleum Special."  Yikes!

[Deggesty]

rcdrye

1) if those are FTs then that's likely taken at NYC's 61st st facility in Chicago, in which case RI FT's make sense.

2) in MofW red, thats an ex-SP&S F7 (805) that was returned to fright service in 1974 during a business upturn.  No one bothered to repaint it to green.

3) see (2) since the rotary is at the other end of the string...

4) 1604/1605 is NYC's lone set of F2s in the original F-unit paint scheme.  The FTs carried the same paint when new.

 

Yes, No. 2 is frightening, so it is proper to use it in fright service. 

[rcdrye]

1) if those are FTs then that's likely taken at NYC's 61st st facility in Chicago, in which case RI FT's make sense.

2) in MofW red, thats an ex-SP&S F7 (805) that was returned to fright service in 1974 during a business upturn.  No one bothered to repaint it to green.

3) see (2) since the rotary is at the other end of the string...

4) 1604/1605 is NYC's lone set of F2s in the original F-unit paint scheme.  The FTs carried the same paint when new.

[Miningman]

1) Ok so the Mercury looked like the Empire State Express for a while. Now where the heck are we here?  What is that in the background on the higher elevation tracks to the right?  Looks like FT's? No? This is a strange photo!

 

2)  A red Burlington Northern F unit. If you put this on your layout you need to defend yourself!  Keep a copy photo in your pocket.

 

3)  If you want to continue to go all wonky with BN stuff then this is a must.

 

4)  So what do we have here? Some kind of intermediate paint scheme of abbreviated lightning stripes but not quite a cigar band. Not too crazy about it.

 

 

[Flintlock76]

Overmod

By the Seventies even the cheapest B-pictures could be processed and distributed in color .

Reminds me of Mel Brook's "Young Frankenstein."  When Mel was preparing to do the movie he planned on shooting it in black and white in the spirit of those old Universal horror films.  He figured it would be cheaper too.

He got a hell of a shock when he found out the black and white film stock would have to be specially made and would cost more  than color stock!  No-one used B&W anymore!  

[Flintlock76]

Gee, as a little boy I always  thought the Captain looked old!

Of course, the long the show was on the less "old" makeup he needed.  Didn't need the grey wig anymore either. 

Well, we Boomers will never forget him!  Or Mr. Green Jeans, Mr. Moose, Bunny Rabbit, Grandfather Clock.  A wonderful little world. 

[Miningman]

Good good, thank you for the (sad) info. Oh yeah the ping pong balls which you just knew were coming and despite shouting at the tv with the warning fell on the unsuspecting Captain. 

29 years and over 6,000 episodes. Not bad.

Ok...'57, '58, early grade school years, Captain Kangaroo is on, I always sat crossed legs Buddha style right in front of the tv, my dad is getting washed and dressed for work but listens intently from other rooms, laughs a lot and throws out some comments, steam locomotives are a block away, lots of whistling.. lots! chugging, switching, thru trains Limiteds, locals and manifests, water and coaling towers, icing reefers, that's the ambient background noise. 

[Overmod]

Miningman

The show had a nice pace to it and good comedy. There must be something? No?

When I first went out to LA in the '90s one of the first things I did was join the Museum of Broadcasting to get full access to their library, which has a great many archives of television.  That was where I was first made aware of the awful downside of the Ampex videotape revolution.

There are a few kinescopes of parts of the show, some of them shot 'off air' with the various artifacts you'd expect from NTSC broadcast quality.  That is all that remains, with the likelihood that any 'hidden tapes' will be retrieved dwindling with every additional year of self-magnetizing (and presumably acetate deterioration).  Nitrate film issues are bad enough, but there are techniques to recover and reconstruct frame-by-frame even severely deteriorated material.  That's not really practical with most types of degraded magnetic tape.

Here's a bit of the flavor, although this is from a much later era (you won't be shocked at how old the Captrain's become if you didn't remember him from the early '60s):

Of course, production was repeatedly shot with the same magazines of tape -- you'd be surprised at how heavy an hour's worth of 2" run at broadcast speed is, and how much that cost.

I think this was right at the beginning of interest in syndication of kid's shows, which at the very least would produce 16mm frame-transfer versions.  But it was also right on the cusp of widespread color programming, which was noted of a paradigm shift in broadcasting than I think many people appreciate.

One of the great earthquake 'singularities' in life changes was something I hadn't been expecting, but should have.  The thing that made Walter Annenberg rich was that Google of the Fifties, TV Guide magazine.  In its listings a color broadcast was indicated by a little C icon in a TV-screen-shaped outline, and in the mid-Sixties that meant a real big-budget production.  One day I picked up a copy and found the convention had been switched to "BW" ... and I knew the world of my childhood was ended forever.

There was a parallel shift in filmmaking.  Many early-Sixties films were famously, and elegantly, shot in black-and-white; the whole genre of 'film noir' hinges on it.  By the Seventies even the cheapest B-pictures could be processed and distributed in color ... perhaps as has been said to compete with the perceived threat of color TV on larger and larger (this is a very ironic interpretation of 'larger' by jaded modern standards!) ... and B&W became a nostalgia medium nearly immediately.

This was true of commercials and graphic design, too.  Quite a bit of very great ingenuity and talent was used in design and production of material with 'punch' in black and white.  This became particularly notable in the 'modern' Sixties, after about 1963, but very little survived even in the early '70s, and while the 'French ad' boom brought back some of the idea, there is comparatively little ingenious spare design since ... which is a shame.

[Miningman]

That's quite interesting, did not know that exactly about the why they are all lost. Was hoping one day they could be 'found' and restored.

So no moose, rabbit, Grandfather Clock, Mr. Greenjeans. The show had a nice pace to it and good comedy. There must be something? No?

[Flintlock76]

Overmod

 That for example is why the great and rich world of the Captain Kangaroo shows I so enjoyed as a child is almost wholly lost

Funny you should bring that up.

I remember one of the features of the "Captain Kangaroo" show was a good-sized Lionel layout, that is I remember it first-hand from watching the show as a child.  The trains would run while music played in the background, very impressive for a little boy to watch!

I've tried to find the segments on YouTube to post on the "Classic Toy Trains" Forum but no luck so far.  As you say, they're probably lost.

[Overmod]

Flintlock76

You'll never find a videotape from that time that looks as good as a film does.  If you do, it's almost a miracle.

And that's acknowledging that almost all the 'videotape' material you see IS FILM -- the result of kinescoping a broadcast signal.  A very important piece of TV economics was the ability of scary-expensive 2" videotape to be 'adaptively reused' for subsequent broadcasts when there wasn't an established arrangement for 'encore telecasts'.  That for example is why the great and rich world of the Captain Kangaroo shows I so enjoyed as a child is almost wholly lost -- kids all too often have poor memories when they don't realize things might be important to remember much later than their experience could possibly give them comparison for.

Even the relatively cheap film in Kinescopes has better resolution than 'broadcast' imaging of an NTSC signal...

[Flintlock76]

Could be, but I figured it's a TARDIS because what ever it is, it has to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside to be of any use to anyone! 

There doesn't seem to be much to it behind those doors!

[Penny Trains]

Flintlock76

Photo 2) It's a TARDIS. But it's not the Doctor's, we know what his looks like. Must mean the Master is lurking around somewhere!

It's a Dalek stronghold. 

[Flintlock76]

Thank goodness someone back in the 60's had the foresight to put these bands on film, and not just videotape. Film is darn near permanent, videotape will deteriorate over time. 

Assuming of course they didn't use cheap film, but that's another story.

You'll never find a videotape from that time that looks as good as a film does.  If you do, it's almost a miracle.

[Miningman]

Back to Joe Meek for a sec. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OuUpOerfT2I

I'm lying on the beach in Port Dover, burgers, fries and malt vinegar wafting thru the air, seagulls looping around everywhere, .. living the dream. 

Thanks Overmod and Flintlock for the great music... let's go surfing!

[Flintlock76]

Overmod

I think I read about that Railroad of the Mystics in the Ball & Frimbo book on the '40s.  Secretly related to these?

 

More photos!  OK...

Photo 1)  The poet Kipling said it best:

               "Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie..." *  

Photo 2)  Looks to me like an underground nuke shot's about to happen!

*  For further reference.  http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_smuggler.htm  

[Flintlock76]

Miningman

"No, no, I said I need trucks, not A truck!"

 

2)  Railroad of the Mystics. The door opens to Space Time. Cannot reveal the location. Not yet. Someday.

 

 

Goody!  More photos!  Let's see here...

Photo 1)  Man, that's one strong truck!  I gotta get me one too!  But they should realign that camper on the flatbed, you know?

Photo 2)  It's a TARDIS.  But it's not the Doctor's, we know what his looks like.  Must mean the Master is lurking around somewhere!

[Flintlock76]

Didn't care for the first one much, but the next two, oh yeah, makes you want to grab a six-pack and head for the beach! 

But it's hard to beat this sweet classic from the 60's, before the whole decade when down the tubes.  It sounded good coming from a transistor on the beach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqMZePE7SQk  

[Overmod]

Miningman

The story of Joe Meek...

All these guys are fun to discuss but they weren't the source of the sound.  This ... THIS is the fountainhead:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fHEmDLQKrrk

And that pretty quick will get you here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIU0RMV_II8

Then the algorithm kicks in and we come out here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vITjH5OO-yU

 

[Overmod]

I think I read about that Railroad of the Mystics in the Ball & Frimbo book on the '40s.  Secretly related to these?

[Miningman]

"No, no, I said I need trucks, not A truck!"

 

2)  Railroad of the Mystics. The door opens to Space Time. Cannot reveal the location. Not yet. Someday.

 

[Miningman]

Yes those were heady days! Not only that they were fun too, not just because we were younger because the future looked limitless and the air was electric. 

The story of Joe Meek... fascinating and tragic. Well worth the short read.

https://www.steynonline.com/10040/telstar