The Disneyland Freight Train (1950s)

[DHI]

I know that I'm new here. With Paul over at DHI, I put together that video on the Carolwood Combine Event. We followed it up this week with a shorter video on the Disneyland Freight Train. The footage of Frontierland is from 1955. Sadly, I didn't have enough footage of the train from 1955 alone to complete the video. So the footage of the Freight Train is from 1955-1958. I have tons of Retlaw 1 footage from 1955, but it seems that many people with cameras didn't make it over to the Frontier Station to take their shots. So I have significantly less footage from 1955 of the Freight Train. The photos are from June, 1955 and also (I believe) 1958 (never before published) and show (among other things) Walt riding the rails on the first official steam-up (June 18), the first unofficial steam-up (which was completed shortly before the famous June 18, 1955 steam-up), and also some reference shots of the cars (during / just after?) their seating additions in the late 1950s.

I think you'll enjoy it. It's short.

Todd J. Pierce

Link to video: http://youtu.be/m-qlsLyKMHc

[CP173]

Todd,

Thank you very much for putting together these videos. They contain footage that I've never seen before, which doesn't happen very often.

Do you have any color shots or footage that clearly show the side of the combine? Some of the images we have make it look like the number "101" was originally a maroon color. Others seem to indicate that it was green. When we restored the car, we went with green because the numbers on the other Retlaw 1 cars were definitely green.

But it would be good to know if that choice was correct or not.

Thanks again for all you do to help preserve these wonderful memories.

[DHI]

I'll check and get back to you. (Is this Tim?) I actually have some color July 17th footage I'll see if the combine shows up on that. You mean just the combine numbering, right?

[Brian]

Awesome video! It is really cool to see the trains passing each other at the stations. Thanks for sharing.

[DHI]

Looks dark green to me. Just found it on 16mm, from fall 1955. (Probably September.)

Maybe the problem is this: though I can't speak to the coach cars specifically, I do know that there was a great deal of re-painting done at Disneyland immediately after the park opened to unify color palettes, etc. Fantasyland in particular saw a lot of paint later in the summer of 1955.

[CP173]

Thanks, Todd, for the quick reply. The "101" is likely dark green. The only reason there is some doubt is that it doesn't look green in this photo from 1962:


If you zoom in, the color of the "101" does not appear to match the color of the "U.S. Railway Post Office", but instead has a maroon cast to it.

It's odd that we haven't found a fairly close up shot in color of that part of the car.

[Steve DeGaetano]

Michael,

This is just a theory, but I surmise the reason the number looks maroon in that photo is because the glossy paint is reflecting the yellow of the handcar deck immediately in front of it, thereby altering our perception of the color.

Todd, thank you so much for thinking of us. The movie is awesome!

[Roy]

...This is just a theory, but I surmise the reason the number looks maroon in that photo is because the glossy paint is reflecting the yellow of the handcar deck immediately in front of it, thereby altering our perception of the color...

I thought of that, too. But the following car looks to have a similarly colored number, and the closest thing to it is the green hedge.

[Steve DeGaetano]

Good point.

[DHI]

I'll put out another theory.

If you look at the skin tones in that photo, you'll find that they are a little off.

I suspect that that photo has been manipulated with color correction in photoshop. I've used hue matching programs to triangulate color values in older films. I can tell you that sometimes the process has unexpected results. So if Dave (who owns this image) hue-matched the yellows in this image (which also seem off to me) the matching process might've altered other values in the yellow range, such as green.

Just a theory.

Images fade cover time. Hue matching can bring a lot of vitality back to old photos/films, but the process isn't perfect.