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You are at: CarrTracks > Gallery Gallery of Jack Delano pictures of the Santa Fe Railway for RailfansIn March 1943, the Office of War Information gave an assignment to Jack Delano that any railfan of that time or even today would die for. The assignment was to ride Santa Fe freight trains from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles and photograph how the railroad worked. Jack took over 1,000 pictures during that trip and these are available on the Library of Congress website. They are not copyrighted since Jack was working for the government. However, the pictures at the Library of Congress website are not presented in the order in which they were shot. Also there were transcription errors made on some of the captions for his pictures. I wanted to present his trip in a way that you could view the pictures more easily. I have tried to correct the captions and also provide some other useful information that may help you appreciate the work that Jack did as well as give you a better understanding of the operations of the Santa Fe during the Second World War. I would encourage you to write to the Library of Congress and ask them to rescan the pictures at a higher resolution. These pictures are now over 60 years old and are part of our national treasure. I would hate for us to miss an opportunity to improve the presentation of these pictures to the railfan community and the public. This link will take you to the Library of Congress ask a librarian page. In the question field you could enter something like the following: "Is it possible for the Library of Congress to rescan the Jack Delano photographs taken for the FSA/OWI? I am particularly interested in his pictures of the Santa Fe railroad taken in March 1943. The color pictures are pretty good, but the black and white pictures in the archive are very fuzzy and lack significant detail. I would like to see these pictures preserved at the best resolution possible as part of our national heritage." Since I am more familiar with the western half of the Santa Fe system, I will start this gallery at Amarillo. This was just about halfway through Jack Delano's trip. This gallery only has a small set of the all the pictures he took. TexasAmarillo Yard New MexicoClovis, NM ArizonaCheto CaliforniaNeedles, CA |
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