A 1902 Catskill Scene in Color

 

This photo of a Catskill & Tannersville Railway train waiting at Haines Corners Station is well-known to Catskill students and Mountain Top scholars. The original photo was taken circa 1902 by the Detroit Photographic Company, and resides today at the Library of Congress (here).

This is an as-best-I-could colorization based on careful research, which included poring over the original factory paperwork of the locomotive in the photo.

My Process

The impetus for this colorization came when I discovered the original factory specification for the locomotive in the photo, which described its paintwork. With this precious and unlikely document, I knew I had to take a stab at colorizing a photo of the engine, and what better photo to choose than one of the most iconic rail images ever lensed in the Catskills?

The locomotive in the picture is Catskill & Tannersville Railway No. 2. It was built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1901, and fortunately, a ton of Baldwin records survive at Southern Methodist University's DeGolyer library. This includes Catskill & Tannersville No. 2's specification sheet, with hundred-year-old, hand-written notes of special features. It takes a bit of study to interpret the Baldwin nomenclature, but once you have the hang of it, you can decipher the paint scheme of virtually any locomotive built by Baldwin, available online, here.

Fortunately, No. 2's paint scheme was simple: all black, no striping, lettering in "lemon yellow." (1) It was also slightly disappointing because I had been hoping the engine would have some color to it, but ho, hum.

I looked at period paint catalogs and it seems "lemon yellow" was a vibrant, sunny yellow - as opposed to something like imitation gold which would be a duller, brownish yellow.

Finally, at this time Baldwin was painting all walking surfaces and roofs of its locomotives with a durable, brownish oxide paint. The boiler jacket was unpainted, rust-proof planished iron, a miracle material of its day that had a gunmetal appearance. The jacket could reflect its surroundings and thus appear bluish under a clear sky, but according to the most recent research, in neutral light would look gray (2).

I added some blue reflection from the sky to the shiny paintwork on the locomotive, but I'm not sure it's evident. Done with the locomotive, I moved on to the rest of the photo.

Whatever colors the Catskill & Tannersville may have used on their passenger cars are unrecorded, but they probably followed the practice of the Catskill Mountain Railway down near Palenville, of which the C&T was basically a functioning subsidiary. (The two lines were owned by the same people, and shared the same superintendent.) There is no known documentation for the year 1902, but history records two things. First, the Catskill Mountain Railway was criticized for the weathered appearance of its passenger cars (3), and second, eventually (unspecified date) the color used was "wine." (4) The Otis Elevating Railway cars delivered in 1892 were wine-colored, suggesting the Beach-owned narrow gauges as a whole may have switched to wine by then. I have therefore depicted the coach painted a worn and slightly faded red. The roof was likewise unknown so I borrowed a page from other railroads of the period and made it a drab tan (5).

There is even less known about the structure colors the Mountain Top railroads used so I turned to an 1887 Sherwin-Williams Catalogue of Railway Colors for inspiration and lifted a livery straight from there (6). Incidentally it's very similar to what artist Robert Skiba used for the "Two Stations in Haines Falls" railroad print the Mountain Top Historical Society sells, so maybe he and I looked at the same source material. Okay, so the lettering on the station should probably be a different color, but I got lazy.

This photo has been colorized before, but the previous artist never had the locomotive specification sheet handy. Now it's been done properly! (By an amateur, at least.)

I should also note that I did the colorization all by hand using the program GIMP. A warning for AI-colorized photos: for the most part, they're baloney. In Victorian times, different photographic emulsions saw colors differently. For instance, one might construe red as a dark gray and blue as a pale gray, while another would do the opposite. Still another resulted in pale yellow passenger cars appearing as dark gray in black-and-white photographs. Simply put, there is no way to tell the color of something just by looking at a black-and-white photograph. For this reason, AI is a poor tool for accurate colorizations of photos. Fun, maybe! But not accurate.

I am not a fashion historian so I chose not to colorize the clothes of the passengers. The train, after all, was my primary interest for this project.

In terms of color research, so far, the Catskill & Tannersville is the only Catskill railroad I have found with written, primary source evidence for its locomotive paint schemes. If you have any other information - please drop me a line! I have a page called Colors of the Catskill Railroads and am always seeking additional primary source documentation about the paint colors used by the Catskill railroads. Did the Ulster & Delaware letter its locomotives in gold leaf, silver, or lemon yellow? Were the Kaaterskill's locomotives black, or a just as likely dark green? Who knows! But I'd love to!

(Author's update: upon seeing No. 2's 1901 builder's photo at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, it appears the cab windows may have been varnished wood, rather than painted black as I depicted them. Oh, well. Next time!)

References:

1. Baldwin Locomotive Works Records, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

2. Wyatt, Kyle. Paint in Black & White Photographs. PacificNG.org, https://www.pacificng.com/template.php?page=ref/russiairon/wyattpaint.htm

3. Helmer, William F. Rip Van Winkle Railroads. 1999. Description of reports from state inspectors.

4. Railroad Magazine, February 1949, Volume 48, Issue 1, page 88-95: Reminder of the Past

5. Denver & Rio Grande practice as interpreted by historian Andrew Brandon

6. Sherwin-Williams Catalogue of Railway Colors, 1887, https://archive.org/details/1887-sherwin-williams-catalogue-of-railway-colors-patrick-herman-collection-reduced/page/n123/mode/2up