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Back in 2007, Morning Sun Books published my first book, “Wabash in Color, Vol.2”. As I’ve noted elsewhere on my site, my dad’s father worked for the Wabash for 30 years, and my father interned there while in college.

Taking train photos was my dad’s hobby, and of course, the Wabash was his favorite railroad. He wandered all over western Illinois shooting Wabash trains, and one of his favorite haunts was the “blink and you miss it” hamlet of Bement. This tiny town was where the Wabash mainlines from Detroit and Chicago converged, proceeding west to Decatur and St Louis. The Illinois Terminal RR also passed through Bement, and its overpass provided a nice vantage point for shots of the line to and from Chicago.

In July and August of 1964, exactly 50 years ago, my dad took shots of the Wabash Banner Blue as it rounded the curve towards Chicago in the sweet light of the evening. First up is the shot found on pages 88-89 of “Wabash in Color, Vol.2”. GP9 #486 & 493 lead the train through the scene, with an Erie Lackawanna baggage car, a dome, and a Wabash business car in tow among others.

A month later, my dad returned to Bement to capture Wabash Alco PA #1052 leading an E-7 with the Banner Blue. My dad had this shot enlarged many years ago to a 16×20 print, but somewhere in time the original slide was lost. Had it been available, it would have made for a tough shot-selection choice to the one above. Dad’s in the process of moving to California, and gave me this print as the only evidence that the Wabash did indeed mix the PAs and the Es on the Chicago trains like they did the Detroit trains. I’ve taken a “photo of the photo” as the only short-notice means of preserving this image in a digital format. The print had faded some over time, and I did the best I could to enhance it with Photoshop.