$40.00 CAD
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Great RPPC photo postcard of a parked locomotive #5300, behind it two railcars, one painted ‘BALTIMORE AND OHIO’ on its side. Dates from c.1930.
Written on back “Baltimore & Ohio Rd Pacific type loco #5300 ‘President Washington’".
Photographer’s stamp ‘Railroad Photographs 47 Royal Street Allston, Mass.’ and ‘Photo by H.W. PONTIN’
Based on AZO photographic paper used, dates to 1926-1940.
Some hand-written text UR.
(Red text is an electronic watermark that is not physically part of the photo for sale)
Once upon a time, the Rail Photo Service was a huge force in railroad publishing. Not a company or a business in the usual sense, it was a sort of co-op of railroad photographers, strung out all across the country and apparently pledging their work to the organization. The man in charge was H. W. Pontin. He made quite a name for himself over several decades.
Pontin is in the great tradition of professional railroaders who loved their job so much they decided to take a camera along. Born in England in 1893, he moved to the U.S. as a child and years later hired on with New York Central’s Boston & Albany subsidiary. He was 20. There he would stay for 45 years, until retirement in 1958, most of those years spent on the right-hand side of the cab, running steam through Massachusetts.
It didn’t take long for Pontin to gain a reputation as an unusually talented photographer
http://cs.trains.com/ctr/b/mileposts/archive/2018/09/11/the-blue-stamp-meant-great-train-pictures.aspx
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad No. 5300 is a class P-7 4-6-2 'Pacific' type steam locomotive, built by the Baldwin locomotive works in 1927 for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. This type was known as the "President" Class; she is the only surviving member of her class.
This locomotive was assigned on passenger trains and, as the first of the type built, it was (co-incidentally) named "President Washington", after George Washington. It was unveiled at the "Fair of the Iron Horse" in 1927.
The 5300 and its brothers initially hauled the Royal Blue trains between Washington DC and Jersey City, NJ, but they were soon relegated to the western division by the B&O's early dieselisation in the 1930s with the EMC EA/EB units.
She was retired from revenue service in 1958 and is now on static display at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.
