Mechanical Landscapes

Category: Library of Congress Images

  • #426 – Library of Congress Images – Steel Mill Panoramas

    I’ve never worked in the steel industry but I’ve visited the steelworks at Redcar and Scunthorpe and it’s an industry that, as a photographer, continues to fascinate me. The sights, smells and sheer physical size and complexity of the plants are rivaled only by oil refineries. The American steel industry, like the British one is…

  • #425 – Library of Congress Images – the night photography of Jack Delano

    I’ve featured quite a few of Jack Delano’s Library of Congress photographs on this blog over the last 18 months or so. Maybe it’s because he photographed subjects that I am interested in, but his photographs stand out for some reason. While some of the portraits of the railway workers on the Santa Fe and…

  • #424 – Library of Congress Images – street running trains

    I posted some Library of Congress photos of coal trains running through the streets last year. This is something I noted as being quite unusual in the UK. These are some more examples, and this appears to be a full blown express train. This is idle speculation on my part, but I suspect that due to the way…

  • USS Iowa at Brooklyn Naval Yard

    Originally posted on Planes, Boats, Trains: Title: U.S.S. Iowa in dry dock, Brooklyn Navy Yard Date: 1901? Photographer: Detroit Publishing Company Source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994013759/PP/

  • #417 – Library of Congress Images – A Beyer Garrett in Iran

    I posted a while back some pictures I took of the former Beyer Peacock works in Manchester, and it coincided with stumbling across this photograph in the Library of Congress of the trains run by the allied forces on the Iranian Railways in WW2. I actually posted some photographs of British built 8F’s on the line…

  • #414 – Library of Congress Images – Streamliners and The Burlington Zephyr

    A high speed streamlined stainless steel express train – is there anything more effortlessly Art Deco cool than this? Dating back to 1934, the Pioneer Zephyr trains must have seemed to have driven straight off the pages of a science fiction comic when compared to the typical steam locomotive of the day.  The power source…

  • #413 – Pullman Car Works

    This gigantic place was the centre of the Pullman Palace Car empire. Quite literally – the Pullman company built an entire town round the works, and called it Pullman. The town survives today, as does the Pullman brand but very little of the factory does. Google Streetview shows that just the central tower section (and…

  • #412 – Library of Congress Images – Ferris Ships, Western Marine & Salvage and the Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay

    One of the problems with the LoC archive is the erratic key wording and classification. Some pictures are done well, some poorly, some not at all. So it can be pot luck what a search comes back with, and when you are looking for something else a picture may turn up by chance that is…

  • #411 – Library of Congress Images – A Princess Coronation in America

    The Duchess of Hamilton with the Royal Blue on Thomas Viaduct The 38 Princess Coronation class locomotives built by the LMS at Crewe works between 1937 and 1948 were some of the finest ‘top link’ steam locomotives built in the UK. For a while, no. 6220 held the world speed record at 113 mph although…

  • #410 – Library of Congress Images – Mackinac Dock

    More steamers! This is a join up of two images to create a small panorama. It’s a bit distorted as the photographer perhaps didn’t reposition his camera too well between frames, but that’s always a problem if you’re photographing things close to the camera. I’ve had to crop quite a bit off the top and…

  • #409 – Library of Congess Images – SS Majestic Outward Bound

    The SS Majestic was launched in 1889 and so was maybe 12-15 years old when this photograph was taken. She held the Blue Riband for a brief 2 weeks in 1891 with an average speed of 20.1 knots. She was taken out of service in 1912, replaced by Titanic. She was placed in reserve in Birkenhead,…

  • #408 – Library of Congress Images – Cramp’s Shipyard

    I’ve posted a few pictures of American naval ships and naval yards over the last year or so, so here’s a slightly different perspective on the subject. William Cramps shipbuilding yard in Philadelphia was a long established, privately owned shipbuilders that built ships for three major conflicts fought by American forces (the Civil War, World…

  • #400 – Library of Congress Images – SS Rotterdam at Holland America Line Terminal, Hoboken

      This is a panorama created from three separate 8×10 glass plate negative scans. Needless to say, the resultant file is rather large! I recently upgraded my computer as my 6 year old PC with 4GB of RAM struggled with files like this, but the new one has significantly more processing power and Photoshop CC…

  • #398 – Library of Congess Images – Main Street Buffalo

    I’m guessing that this photograph was taken by some intrepid photographer climbing a tall riverside gilding such as a grain elevator as for the most part, downtown Buffalo looks quite a low lying city with few tall buildings. What strikes me about this scene is the clear summer sky, as so many of the photographs…

  • #397 – Library of Congress Images – Logging train

    Although huge swathes of Britain were once forested, much of this was cleared in mediaeval times and before for use as fuel and construction materials (for buildings and ships). So by the time the steam railway came along, there wasn’t much left and there was no requirement for railway haulage out of the forests. However,…

  • #392 – Library of Congress Images – River Steamers

      Harbor Springs, Mich., Str. North Land at dock Large river steamers were not unique to America, big Paddle Steamers carried day trippers on British rivers too. Steamers such as the PS Waverley were once a common site on the Clyde, Bristol Channel, and around Britain’s coasts. And, like America, by the 1960’s, their days of…

  • #391 – Library of Congress Images – Switching (shunting) locomotive

    http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/npc2008011106/ This image was simply titled Bethlehem Steel in the Library of Congress archive, and had no supporting information other than it was published in the period 1910-1920. Interestingly, the engine has written Washington Terminal on the tender, which is confusing given the title of the picture. Wikipedia tells me that the Washington Terminal company…

  • #390 – Library of Congress Images – Mallett articulated locomotive

    Although articulated locomotives were a British innovation, and Beyer Peacock built over a thousand of them, only a few Beyer Garrets and narrow gauge Fairlie’s ever saw service in Britain. However, articulated locomotives were quite widely used in other areas of the world, especially where huge amounts of power were required without the loading gauge…

  • #389 – Library of Congress Images – Ironton Blast Furnace

    This photo is titled ‘Columbia Steel Company at Ironton, Utah a locomotive outside the blast furnace’. The Utahrails website gives an early history of the steelworks, but doesn’t explain its relatively short life of only 40 years. Despite the lack of established heavy industry in the area, Utah was home to deposits of iron ore,…

  • #382 – Library of Congress Images – Paddle Steamer Tashmoo

    If you’re slightly familiar with some of my blog posts from this year, you’ll have seen a number featuring the Lake Lucerne paddle steamers in Switzerland. So it felt like a good idea to look at what the Library of Congress archive held when it came to paddle steamers. Answer – hundreds. This is just one of…

  • #381 – Library of Congress Images – Really Big Machines

    While browsing the Library of Congress Historical American Engineering Record, I came across some photographs of something I had actually seen. A few years ago, I visited the Wyman Gordon Forge in Worcester, Massachusetts in an official capacity to see their (almost) unique 50000 ton press in action. For a piece of metal bashing machinery,…