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| The Crystal Ball | ||
| by Jim Wrinn | ||
| In memory of Kate Wrinn, who died March 14, at age 78. My mother was not a railroad enthusiast. But she was a darn good supporter of my interests in railroading. I credit the ability to get out and see and do a lot of things at a young age to my parents-mom, especially. I could relate to you countless instances of her efforts to get me as close as possible to the railroading in our part of the country. I won't bore you with all the details, but I will share one story that I always found humorous, illustrative of her devotion and certainly changed my appreciation for steam railroading. As a young teen railfan starting to explore the railroad world through excursion trains and the nearby Graham County Railroad's tourist line, I was coming home with fuzzy pictures of Southern Railway 4501 in Asheville, Southern Pacific 4449 in her Freedom Train outfit and Graham County's Shays. They were products of the family's 110 instamatic camera-a camera with the dimensions of an elongated pack of cigarettes you could stuff in your back pocket. It made good family snapshots, but lousy images of steam engines at speed. While I had no one to compare them with in remote western North Carolina, the pictures I got back (from Jack Rabbit processing in Spartanburg, S.C.) looked nothing like what I was seeing in the pages of Trains magazine. In my mind, they were portraits, but in reality, they were smudgy images. Mom to the rescue. She noticed that I wasn't happy with the photos. "I want to take photos like these," I told her, showing a copy of Trains, where T&P 610 was as razor sharp in the pages as it was in real life. Her mind went to work. In the spring of 1977, my parents took me to my first Cass railfan weekend. We'd been there the year before on vacation, but I was clamoring for some more time at this Shay nirvana. There were hundreds of folks with cameras stamping around the depot area, and mom stopped some of them for advice. What kind of camera does he need? What brand? Where do I get it? How she decided which persons to stop is still a mystery to me. But whomever she cornered, they apparently advised her well. That Christmas, I received the gift of a Nikkormat FT-3, a big, manual 35mm Nikon. A few weeks later, I took my first "test roll" of black and white 120-speed film on some empty tracks at Dillsboro-ironically now the site of Great Smoky Mountains Railroad's loading area for its trains. Since then, I've been lucky enough to photograph thousands of railroad images and found countless hours of enjoyment by recording steam locomotives in rest, under restoration and under steam across the country. I've long ago traded in the FT3 for another simple Nikon with a motor drive. But mom's the one who started me off the right way. She'll always be with me, every frame, every slide and every negative of the way. For those things, and many more, I will always be grateful. A couple of notable trips worth mentioning here are Camerail's one-way excursion from St. Paul to Kansas City with UP Challenger 3985 and trips with Milwaukee Road Northern 261 out of Chicago the same weekend in June. Details are available through the web sites for both groups via Steam Central's extensive links. A suggestion here: Ride the MILW 261 one-way from St. Paul to Chicago, return on Empire Builder and then take the 3985 to KC. You can't beat two big steamers in five days! I'm looking forward to the NRHS convention in August when AT&SF 3751 visits the Grand Canyon Railroad. A photo of the big 4-8-4 at the log depot at the South Rim will be unforgettable, and I'm also anxious to see it on the Hell's Canyon bridge on the Peavine south of Ash Fork. Details: www.canyonrails2002.com Our next update will be July 1, and hopefully some of the fall steam activities will be on the horizon by then. Have a fun and safe spring with steam. | ||
| Jim Wrinn, a staff writer for The Charlotte Observer and a volunteer at the N.C. Transportation Museum, writes this exclusive preview column quarterly for steamcentral.com. The next installment is July 1-send updates to crystalball@steamcentral.com. | ||
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