Autumn 1967 was the beginning of my junior year at Purdue University. On September 30 I took my Instamatic 100 {students didn't have much money back then} and walked to downtown Lafayette IN to see the last passenger train to run on the Monon Railroad.

When I got the pictures back from the developer, I must not have been very happy with this one {I think I was disappointed that I hadn't gotten a better view of the "farewell" signs railroad employees had placed on the side of the locomotive}, because I tossed the print and negative into a shoebox I used to collect material I didn't want to file but wasn't willing to trash. Over the next 42 years that box grew to become quite a large corrugated cardboard box which I moved several times. In 2009 I purchased a Nikon scanner and began the process of digitizing my collection of media. On occasion I would pull a few slides / negatives from the big box and either scan or dump {at age 69, I didn't want to bequeath this material to some unlucky person}. Almost exactly fifty years after I took this photo, I came across this negative nearly at the bottom of the box, and I had a new appreciation for this image that I hadn't seen in fifty years.

[ChrisPlatt]

With B&W, you at least don't have to worry about color drift.

My childhood family photos were taken by my mom with her 127 Kodak Brownie Starflash camera.
The BW photos (shot on Verichrome, probably) survived but her Anscochrome slides faded and color shifted wildly.
Alas almost everything was washed away in Sandy. My advice is to store your precious photos on a high shelf.

Chris

[gmans]

Scanning the memories and the world in your mind as well. good one. Cheers

[reh321]

Scanning the memories and the world in your mind as well. good one. Cheers

Thank you for your comment

[reh321]

My childhood family photos were taken by my mom with her 127 Kodak Brownie Starflash camera.
The BW photos (shot on Verichrome, probably) survived but her Anscochrome slides faded and color shifted wildly.
Alas almost everything was washed away in Sandy. My advice is to store your precious photos on a high shelf.

Eeeek! You have my sympathy!!

When people talk about the best way to do a backup today. I often ask what they did in the age of film - turns out that most didn't worry about such things then. I made a dupe of every slide, and then stored everything in separate places, negs / original slides in fireproof boxes and prints / dupes somewhere else.

Thank you for the reminder.

[SSGGeezer]

I remember Monon going past my home in Southern Indiana as a child. Did they continue to run freight after their passenger lines stopped operation?

[Schraubstock]

negative has a number of scratches

Thanks for the reply
I have in use Nikon's Super Coolscan 4000 ED which has a function called “Digital ICE or Digital Image Correction and Enhancement”
This does an absolutely breathtaking job cleaning up scratches and dust. Like magic.
Unfortunately it does not work anymore under Win 10 and to overcome this I have loaded Nikon's drivers on a small Win XP SSD and run it of there.
My computer is set up with several HDD Trays so I can swap in and out different HDDs (SSDs).

Cheers

[Riggomatic]

Great story and image. I lived in a small town just south of Lafayette, (Linden, IN) from grade school to the start of middle school. We used to play on the cross-tracks, and hop on a slow moving train every now and then. Your photo brought back some great memories!

Fellow Purdue grad too, (class of '94).

Thanks for sharing.

[SSGGeezer]

Fellow Purdue grad too, (class of '94).

You and Orville Redenbacher! he was class of 27 though I believe. (If I remember the plaque on his wall.) I made fun of him going to the school with the ugliest campus in the US. Go IU!

[reh321]

Thanks for the reply
I have in use Nikon's Super Coolscan 4000 ED which has a function called “Digital ICE or Digital Image Correction and Enhancement”
This does an absolutely breathtaking job cleaning up scratches and dust. Like magic.
Unfortunately it does not work anymore under Win 10 and to overcome this I have loaded Nikon's drivers on a small Win XP SSD and run it of there.
My computer is set up with several HDD Trays so I can swap in and out different HDDs (SSDs).

Cheers

Yes, the scanner I used is a Nikon LS-2000, which also has that software; I maintain my Dad's old WinXP box as a stand-alone system just to run that scanner {I use USB drives with it, then "sneaker net" to transfer files to my main (Linux) computer}... but after 50 years, including several as a student, this negative had picked up "issues" that ICE could alleviate, but were still apparent at 200%.

[reh321]

You and Orville Redenbacher! he was class of 27 though I believe. (If I remember the plaque on his wall.) I made fun of him going to the school with the ugliest campus in the US. Go IU!

The main shortcoming of Purdue's campus has always been a lack of trees. Apparently that wasn't always true, but a mass die-off occurred because of one of those scourges that swept the country, and they've never gotten around to replacing enough of them. My wife and I met at IU during our grad school days. I live a few miles from two campuses that are nicer looking than IU - Notre Dame and St. Mary's.

[SSGGeezer]

The main shortcoming of Purdue's campus has always been a lack of trees. Apparently that wasn't always true, but a mass die-off occurred because of one of those scourges that swept the country, and they've never gotten around to replacing enough of them. My wife and I met at IU during our grad school days. I live a few miles from two campuses that are nicer looking than IU - Notre Dame and St. Mary's.

My Mom worked at the IU school of business and my Sister got her Master's and taught at IU, as did my Father when he was working on his PHD. (Way back when.....) I still like Bloomington and have lots of good memories from living there as a kid and young teen.
Still actually you have very ugly buildings at Purdue, but a great Engineering department. Ask the first several batches of American Astronauts.

[reh321]

My Mom worked at the IU school of business and my Sister got her Master's and taught at IU, as did my Father when he was working on his PHD. (Way back when.....) I still like Bloomington and have lots of good memories from living there as a kid and young teen.
Still actually you have very ugly buildings at Purdue, but a great Engineering department. Ask the first several batches of American Astronauts.

Yeah, we used to say they followed a consistent "early sweatshop" architecture. My favorite place on campus was the railroad club, which had a massive layout in the Union's sub-basement.

[SSGGeezer]

Yeah, we used to say they followed a consistent "early sweatshop" architecture.

I suspect that the architect was a fan of the Brutalist movement. Ugh!

[reh321]

Great story and image. I lived in a small town just south of Lafayette, (Linden, IN) from grade school to the start of middle school. We used to play on the cross-tracks, and hop on a slow moving train every now and then. Your photo brought back some great memories!

Fellow Purdue grad too, (class of '94).

Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for your comment

[reh321]

I remember Monon going past my home in Southern Indiana as a child. Did they continue to run freight after their passenger lines stopped operation?

The Monon was merged into the Louisville&Nashville in the early 1970's. Several mergers later, a railroad simply known as CSX is the successor to all of that - I don't know how much of their track remains and how much has been repurposed.