Date Nails

One day in about 1975 my father and I were walking along the Ann Arbor Railroad in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We were looking for discarded insulators when my father noticed a nail in one of the railroad ties with a number on top of it. We soon noticed that these nails were in many of the ties and we were able to pull out a few using just our fingers. A new hobby was born!

In the next several years, I spent a lot of time walking various railroad tracks in numerous states looking for and pulling these nails. Besides Michigan, I looked for date nails in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Texas, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, New York, Wisconsin, Colorado and Ontario. I pulled hundreds of nails from these railroads (and maybe others):

Chicago and North Western
Grand Trunk Western
Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific (The Milwaukee Road)
New York Central
Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis (Big 4 Route)
Michigan Central
Ann Arbor
Wabash
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe
Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern
Chicago and Illinois Midland
Illinois Central
Great Western Railroad
Canadian National
Erie
Chicago, South Shore and South Bend
St. Louis and Southwestern (Cotton Belt)
Southern Pacific
Texas Pacific
Detriot, Toledo, and Ironton
Detroit and Toledo Shoreline
Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh
New York, Chicago and St. Louis (Nickel Plate Road)

I had joined the Texas Date Nail Collector’s Association back then so I had many contacts with other collectors. I participated in trading nails with these other collectors and accumulated nails from many other railroads by trading extras that I had collected myself. The nails from the Grand Trunk Western were the easiest to trade for some reason.

The oldest nail I ever found still in the track was a "6" representing 1906. The second oldest was a "13" on the same line not far from where I found the "6". Both from a Big Four branch line in Michigan.

I haven’t collected date nails for many years but I still have the collection. You can read all about date nails on this page and you can find some photos of part of my collection here.

Insulators

One of the offshoots of my interest in railroads is a past interest in collecting insulators. You know, those glass or porcelain thingamabobs on telephone poles. There are lots of people who collect these and there are even insulator shows from time to time. I went to one in Houston one time and it was very interesting seeing some of the rarer insulators on display.

I got interested in these things sometime in the late 60’s or early 70’s when I found some lying around somewhere – probably along the railroad tracks. My father and I embarked on a number of mostly unsuccessful insulator hunts. Most of the ones we saw were still in use and it would have been difficult and illegal to collect those. We thought any discarded insulators along the way were fair game, though.

There were several good finds that we had. I remember one time, my father somehow got word that the Chicago and North Western Railway had taken down some poles and left the insulators lying at the base of the poles. This was somewhere out west of Sterling, Illinois. We made a trip out there and collected about 100 insulators most of which I no longer have. I kept only the better ones that were not chipped or were unusual in some way. I recall that a lot of them had a spiral groove to hold the wire. And some of these had the name HEMINGRAY with a backwards E.

Another of our collecting successes was along the Chicago Great Western Railway. This particular part of that railroad was abandoned in the early 70’s and the wires on the poles along the right-of-way were cut at intersections. So, we were confident that there was no electricity in them. But how to get the insulators off the pole without lugging a ladder around? We created a 10 or 12 foot pole with a loop of rubber insulated wire on the end. The wire was slipped over the insulator and then twisted tight on the glass and then turned. We were able to slowly unscrew and remove the insulator in this way. There were some neat porcelain insulators along this line that looked hand made. Still have them.

Eventually I lost interest in collecting these since they were taking up so much room and they were getting harder to find. I still looked for them in every antique shop I went in and occasionally would find an interesting one. I have acquired several purple ones this way.

When I moved to Texas, I was driving around with my wife one day and spotted a bunch of poles with insulators lying along the Santa Fe railway northeast of Dallas. Couldn’t resist grabbing a few. We went back there and hiked here and there along the line picking up a few select others as well. This line runs from Dallas to Paris, Texas. This kindled a renewed interest in collecting these for a while but it faded again.

I have some of the better insulators on display on my display shelves in my model train room.

Waterton Canyon

Waterton Canyon was carved by the South Platte River southwest of Denver. The mouth of the canyon is at the far south end of Wadsworth Blvd. several miles south of C470 near the Lockheed Martin facilities. Some information about Waterton Canyon is readily available on the internet. You can read about it being the beginning of the Colorado Trail, how you can do some good mountain biking once you reach the Strontia Springs Dam, how the road is closed to automobiles, how the big dam at Strontia Springs is owned by the Denver Water Board, etc. These things are easy to see for anyone who visits the canyon.

Here are some lesser known facts about Waterton Canyon:

1. The start of the canyon is at a location known as Kassler. This was a water treatment facility built in 1889. The facility is not used for water treatment anymore but there are still some active buildings there.

2. The Highline Canal has its start about a mile and a half up the canyon. Once you get up there a ways, you can see a concrete wall on the other side of the river. This is actually the wall of the canal. The canal’s water is diverted through a tunnel upstream a bit further. You can see where the water exits the tunnel at the location where two large pipes cross the road. This canal is about 70 miles long and it ends up near the Denver airport. The canal was built between 1879 and 1883.

3. Those two large pipes are diversions of their own. One of them feeds into Marston Lake in Littleton. Where the other one goes, I don’t know.

4. A little ways before the pipes cross the road, you might notice what appear to be bridge abutments parallel to the road on the side opposite the river. These concrete abutments supported yet another large pipeline once upon a time. You can see pictures of them at the Denver Public libraries historic photo website.

5. The road up Waterton Canyon is on the old railroad grade of the Colorado and Southern. It was built originally as the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railway. The railroad eventually made it all the way to Gunnison via Buena Vista and the Alpine Tunnel. It was built through Waterton about 1878 and taken up from the canyon by about 1940.

6. There was a large hotel at Strontia Springs at one time. No evidence of it now. The big concrete dam is called the Strontia Springs Dam.

7. Strontia Springs was formerly called Deansbury.

8. Cell phones don't work in the canyon.

Favorite Railfanning Spots

I live in Colorado near Denver and there are a few good railfanning spots that I especially like. The first is in the Palmer Lake area and the other is in Coal Creek Canyon at Crescent.

Palmer Lake is where the north-south BNSF-UP Joint Line goes from two separate tracks into a single track. This happens just north of the lake in Palmer Lake. It’s a good place for several reasons. There is good parking right there at this park location. You can walk completely around the lake and up and down the tracks in a park trail without trespassing on the railroad right of way. Along this path are numerous good photo vantage points. Second. This location is the top of the hill that goes from Denver all the way south to this location. Southbound coal trains are moving really slow at this point are quite loud as they strain to overcome the hill. BNSF trains often stop about a mile north in “the sag” to cool off before making the final climb. It’s also neat to hear the loud train horns echoing off the nearby foothills.

The other location is in Crescent. This location is on Union Pacific’s (ex Rio Grande) track that heads west of Denver into the tunnel district. Crescent is at a road crossing between tunnels 18 and 19 and is another neat place to photograph some trains from a higher vantage point.

A third place is much closer to home in Highlands Ranch. The same Joint Line I mentioned above has its two tracks close together just about a mile away. There is a nice bike trail practically along the tracks along the Highline Canal and on top of Chatfield Dam from which you can see trains. I have seen many while on my bike rides over there but haven’t done much photography from there.

"cajrrman"

Once upon a time, my personal email address was cajrailfan. That's my initials followed by my hobby. However, eventually, I got so many spams at that address that I ended up abandoning it. You can still find some stuff on Google Web and Google Groups with that id in the search key. I ended up changing it to cajrrman. My initials, followed by "rr" for railroad, followed by "man" for man. That's been my mark of presence on the internet ever since.

I created a website using this id and you can find my other much older web page here. I haven't updated it lately and a few things are definitely out of date. But you can still find a collection of some of my railroad photographs that I have taken over the years. That page has had over 30,000 hits. I'll do an update to it sometime this summer once it stops raining and I can get out and take a few good railroad photos at one of my favorite spots.