Chicago & North Western Railroad

Memories of 1998

This small Web site presents a collection of 1998 photographs of railroad rolling stock as they continue to operate bearing Chicago & North Western colors. Click on any of these thumbnail images for a larger image.

Recent additions These photographs have been added since this Web site was established on 15 February 1999. They are also presented in their appropriate pages. 2 Apr 1999 (16) 25 May 1999 (2)

Freight cars These photographs show just a few of the wide variety of freight cars owned and operated by the Chicago & North Western. Auto rack car (2) Box car (31) Caboose (16) Covered hopper car (28) Flat car (2) Gondola car (10) Open hopper car (9)

Diesel-electric locomotives These photographs show several of the various types of locomotives used by the Chicago & North Western. EMD GP38-2 (2) EMD GP40 (3) EMD GP7R (8) EMD GP9R (14) EMD MP15DC (6) EMD SD38-2 (7) EMD SD40-2 (6) GE C40-8 (1) GE Dash 9-44CW (10)

Several viewing locations in the Chicagoland area were used for these photographs. Parking lots adjacent to the rail yards provided the vantage point for most of these photos. The adjustable 10x camera lens allowed them to be taken without any need to enter railroad property.

Lighting conditions were less than ideal for many of these shots. This was particularly true of those taken at the Proviso rail yard in Melrose Park (Illinois), which frequently required shooting into the sun.

These shots were taken with the digital camera hand-held. I think it is fair to suggest that they often illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the camera, and no doubt of the photographer as well. The nature of the digital camera beast is that the up-front cost is high, but the cost of film is negligible. This has made it practical to take a large number of shots, typically a few hundred in a session, with a variety of bracketing and angles.

The Chicago & North Western railroad heralds displayed at the top of several of pages are photos of freight cars in local rail yards.

My impressions of using Angelfire is mixed. If you are interested, I've some comments on my experiences, in case you might be interested.

When last I counted, there are about one hundred fifty photographs in this site. I may add a few more, but most of my 1998 C&NW photos are now online. You'll also find an Index of Units Photographs by road number for your convenience. I hope you enjoy your visit.

I took these photographs during the Fall of 1998 using a Sony Mavica FD-7 digital camera. Adobe Photoshop was used for electronic dark room processing. I've written a custom perl 5 script which constructs these pages from a terse text description file, using a template file.

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This is an unofficial site without any affiliation with the Chicago & North Western railroad or its successor companies. This is a free site hosted by Angelfire.