urbanSTL

STL From Above shared some pics of this beauty returning to the National Museum of Transport after a 5-year loan to Virginia: 

urban_dilettante wrote: ↑

Jun 13, 2020

https://www.stltoday.com/news/archives/photos-work-in-the-20s-and-30s-widened-several-st-louis-streets/collection_7e157efb-3267-52c2-b337-733ac43205e1.html#1

Amazing, and somewhat depressing, photo.

The street wall / canyon through Cupples...

The very long curved building south of Union Station...

The hundreds of homes along what is now the Gateway Mall and west all the way to Jefferson (I wonder how many of those were A-word houses like Campbell House)...

All the mid-rise buildings in what became 22nd Parkway Valley...

And those appear to be 4 to 5 story walk-up tenament buildings off of Market Street, along 22nd and 23rd, similar to the ubiquitous Brooklyn apartment buildings.

^The curved building is essentially part of the station. That's the various express agencies that shipped by passenger rail.

Fourth and Chestnut, 1872. Found on Facebook. 

To think the Museum of Transport began with a group of folks saving a horse car very similar to that one.

Great pic of Vandeventer and Tower Grove, from St. Louis Memories Facebook page:

^Indeed. That intersection must have been sheer madness before the bridges.

Transportation? How about around the world in a balloon? 

Steve Fossett made two attempts from Busch Stadium to become the first to circumnavigate the globe, solo, non-stop, in a balloon. Both attempts failed. He later succeeded after switching to the Southern Hemisphere. Washington University served as mission control for four of his six attempts (he was an alumni of the Olin Business School).  

This photo is from January 14th, 1997:

^I might just possibly be in the middle of updating the WRHS website where you might have found a couple of those. We have a bunch of the old publicity photos from the inaugural run of the cities and the Bluebird. Management doesn't wish things to be directly linkable from outside, so I'll just provide the address to our historical photos:

http://www.wabashrhs.org/p/historical-photos_24.html

I'm fighting to get things a little more usable again, but some of our board members are sensitive about the fact that an e-bay user at some point in the past ganked a bunch of our photos and sold prints. (Search me why we even have them uploaded at a resolution where that's possible. But I've stepped down from the board and I'm just working on the website for the moment.) But . . . if you have particular Wabash desires pm me or e-mail esec@wabashrhs.org. We have all manner of loveliness. Track diagrams, aerial photos, publicity phots, and who knows what else. In theory we're trying to get an intern from Miliken to help with archiving some of this stuff, as there's buckets of negatives, slides, maps, diagrams, and who knows what else in our archives outside Decatur. Also a fair bit in the personal collection of some longtime members that they're mostly happy to share on request.

symphonicpoet wrote:^I might just possibly be in the middle of updating the WRHS website where you might have found a couple of those. We have a bunch of the old publicity photos from the inaugural run of the cities and the Bluebird. Management doesn't wish things to be directly linkable from outside, so I'll just provide the address to our historical photos:

http://www.wabashrhs.org/p/historical-photos_24.html

I'm fighting to get things a little more usable again, but some of our board members are sensitive about the fact that an e-bay user at some point in the past ganked a bunch of our photos and sold prints. (Search me why we even have them uploaded at a resolution where that's possible. But I've stepped down from the board and I'm just working on the website for the moment.) But . . . if you have particular Wabash desires pm me or e-mail esec@wabashrhs.org. We have all manner of loveliness. Track diagrams, aerial photos, publicity phots, and who knows what else. In theory we're trying to get an intern from Miliken to help with archiving some of this stuff, as there's buckets of negatives, slides, maps, diagrams, and who knows what else in our archives outside Decatur. Also a fair bit in the personal collection of some longtime members that they're mostly happy to share on request.

I’d be interested in seeing anything you have on Wabash in KC.

Oddly, at a glance at the materials I have to hand that's one of the larger holes in our records. There's some calendar shots, but the last time anyone in the society seems to have actually written anything on Kansas City (the town rather than the City of Kansas City, the train) was in the summer of 1993. (And that in an article on interlocking towers.) The membership is much more from Moberly, St. Louis, Decatur, and Chicago. Lately we've acquired a few members on the east end, but so far we've never even met further west than Moberly. (We're planning on having our first ever meet in Omaha/Council Bluffs in the fall, pandemic allowing.) What sort of materials are you looking for? I can put you in touch with the folks in Decatur who can get to the archives and the members who write the articles and have the good collections. PM me your e-mail and maybe a hint at your needs. I'll see what I can do to get you in touch with the folks who can answer your questions, even if I myself cannot. (Clearly we need to do more recruiting on the west end.)

^And there's so very very much more buried in boxes waiting to be scanned. And even squirreled away in folders on the web from assorted past projects there's scads of stuff that needs sorting and tagging to make it useful. Incidentally, if you see issues with the website I'm working on debugging the worst of it. I'm always grateful for bug reports. I'm not sure I realized what I was getting myself into.

^You like railroad history? I could recruit you. I'd love to build a team to work on the social media and the WRHS could use more younger members. (Meaning younger than 70 here. I'm a younger member in this context.) If you'd like to help organize pictures maybe I can work something out. PM me. I'll ask the board.

This is from 2/22/21

Throwback Thursday:

^And what a face it is.

^That's the first time I've seen that in detail. To think that we could've had our own "L" would've been cool. Although I wonder if it would've been dismantled.