The first of many

My first ventures into rail photography took place when I lived in Wyoming, in the mid 1970s. The Burlington Northern Railroad's line through the Wind River Canyon ran a couple of thousand feet below where I lived. I was working as a television engineer, living on a mountaintop high above the canyon.

When I came down off that mountain every couple of weeks, I needed to amuse myself. There weren't a whole lot of things to do, even in town. I ultimately found myself trackside resuming an interest I had mostly given up for cars, planes, girls, and other adolescent pasttimes. But this time I had a camera.

There wasn't much left of Bonneville, Wyoming by the mid 1970s. Some trailer homes, a few dilapidated old buildings, a railroad siding, and this relic of a station from days gone by. This siding was the meeting place of the daily north and southbound trains, so the station was still in use, even to having an agent. I wandered around getting pictures of the station and approaching train. I wish now I had taken more.

The station at Bonneville was still there when I left Wyoming in 1980, but was no longer in service at that time. When I returned for a visit ten years later, it was gone, just a flat spot in the gravel and some broken concrete to mark it's place.