Moving whitelined H-6a #5399, ready for scrap, off turntable, roundhouse in background

NG503048

Moving whitelined H-6a #5399, ready for scrap, off turntable, roundhouse in background

Diesel Roadswitcher

This picture is the last one taken in Shelby Street engine terminal. Its content signifies another aspect of finality, namely the last, Iugubrious run of a condemned steam engine, the trip to the scrap yard, usually made in the most humiliating possible fashion - dead, with rods down, and worse yet, hastened to oblivion by the very + instrument of its downfall. This last run, repeated thousands of times in hundreds of places in a startlingly brief period of time, has somehow represented more than just the end, collectively, of the steam locomotive. The fascination of this machine during every phase of its existence - at speed on a limited, at rest in a roundhouse, in labor with heavy tonnage, in nakedness at a backshop - was of a type that imbedded itself in the minds and memories of a large segment of the public. This phenomenon is evidenced many times over by the large number of steam engines being donated by the traditionally public relations-deficient railroads to cities, towns, expositions, museums, and so on. The railroads, glad as they have been to rid themselves of a type of locomotive which is inefficient and costly to operate, have seemed to realize, even in their haste, that in doing so they are effecting the end of an institution and not merely casting aside a piece of equipment. In the typical scene above, the geep assigned to the first-trick Shop yard job is nosing onto the turntable at Shelby street to start a whitelined steamer, H-6 2-8-2 no. 6399, on her way to her final terminal.

Jeremy Taylor

Jeremy Taylor

2-1/4x3-1/4 neg

May-56

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GP7

414

DRSP-4n

#5805

EMD

Shelby St., Indianapolis, IN

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