A LOT OF POST CARDS...

I have a few thousand penny post cards I picked up at auction in Seattle some years ago, all of them representing American or Canadian railroads in one fashion or another.

The views show everything from train wrecks to crack streamliners, from the Colorado narrow gauge lines to the New York Central's 20th Century Limited.

Many of these post cards were actually used, have short messages on them, and still have their one-cent stamps on them with legible post marks.

So, one of the things I am going to do on this blog is share a few of them with you all, since they do contain slices of our history, bits and pieces of places and things long since gone, often forgotten with the passage of time.

As an example, did you know that Mount Washington, New Hampshire, once had a "scenic" railway?
The below post card, Dated Aug. 12, 1904, shows a typical consist chugging up what was called "Jacob's Ladder".





I chose this card because it is an area where my wife, as a child, used to go rock climbing.

How about my unfinished drawing of a Denver & Rio Grande K36 locomotive boiler?



Or a rendered view of the K36 smokebox?



Here's my drawing of the D&RGW K36 Number 486 builder plate.These are just for starters, and a method for me to gain experience in using all the equipment necessary to get this blog online.

I'll be a bit more focused in the future with posts and try to stick to one theme or subject per post.