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WhyAyeMann777 β Intrepid
Published: 2012-02-04 01:51:44 +0000 UTC; Views: 665; Favourites: 15; Downloads: 3
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a beautiful spring day began to cloud up as forecasted, eventually leading to serious flash flooding in the valley. Whatever the case may be, the trains must get through to settlement nomatter what.Here, we see "GLYNDWR," and 0-8-2 of the Amadahy valley Wide gauge railway, glides her way down the embankment before engineer dave cracks the throttle wide open to get a good head of steam to charge up "the ladder;" A grueling 5 percent incline for over 3.5 miles.
With april downpours on its way, dave needs make due time with his train, so he can get Glyndwr back to her shed before the floods begin...
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Comments: 11
To that brave engineman, get a good running start on that grade, plenty of sand, and don't stop for anything!
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Wow... all these pencil drawings of yours have such a beautiful, soft, atmospheric quality to them... almost dream-like, really. I'm blown away. You, sir, have a gift and no mistake.
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Thank you so much for your kindess. I think about this stuff all the time, however my life for the past few years has seemed to revolve around these fantasies. Ive desired to live in a world like this for so long that I completely shut out the world around me, thus making reality boring, and the beauty of the real world slipped away. I had wondered where it had gone for a long time. Its seems silly that only now i have realized that my craving to be within a world in my head is actually has taken away my ability to appreciate whats around me. Now doors open in my life, but i miss them completely because im always in my head. I have come to the realization that in order to enjoy what is before me in life and to recognize and go through open doors in life is to let go of these dreams and desires. They exist somewhere else, but not in my present reality, and thinking of them will only take away from the beauty and delicousness of the present moment. So i must let it go. only then will I be to fully enjoy the present, and maybe actually be able to live in the world i so desire.
Let go of things you think you need my friend. You have put out your desire, now higher mind will switch you to the track on which your desires lie. Let it go, and let it flow. Its so important.
and THANK YOU for the lovely comments
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You are very welcome indeed, my dear chap. I can definitely relate a lot to what you're saying here... I'm a great lover of nature, but also of steam and all things Victorian, in particular their beautiful architecture and civil engineering. I've always had a vivid imagination, and it's all too often that I find myself lapsing into a reverie in my mind of grand designs for beautiful things that the rest of the world would probably see as being about 120 years out of date. Way I see it, beauty and craftsmanship is timeless. It has no expiration date. I know that nostalgia can, perhaps, be seen as little more than a dangerous delusion - and yet, while I know that society and morality have changed for the better since those days (God knows I wouldn't EVER want a return to 19th-century attitudes to things like race, sexual identity or the treatment of women, thank you very much), I still feel that, starting some time around WWII... we lost something. Something intangible and precious. We lost the balance of form and function, and all attentions became forever focused on the latter, to the exclusion of all else. Machines, once graceful, lovingly-decorated pieces of living and functional art, were tossed on the scrap heap and replaced with soulless, sterile automatons. We lost our respect and our feeling of need for artisans and craftsmen. Buildings became boxes. Architectural stonemasonry and carving seem to pretty much dead for all purposes other than maintaining Cathedrals. Everywhere, things of beauty were destroyed. Ugly was the new beautiful, and beautiful was the new ugly. Instead of George Gilbert Scott, we had John Poulson (anyone who loves beautiful old buildings and hates the senseless destruction thereof, feel free to look up John Poulson and prepare to start crying with rage). The Architect was once a multi-skilled sculptor of our urban landscapes, who would understand that architecture is a moral calling, to create something beautiful yet functional that would uplift the spirits and enrich the lives of any and all who lived in it, worked in it or gazed upon it. Now, the Architect is little more than a computer, a slave. The client feeds data into the architectural machine, and the insipid, dehumanising, uninspiring collection of boxes which fulfils the brief to the minimum cost is processed and placed upon the earth, probably on top of something that had infinitely more grace and dignity but was 19% less efficient by some arbitrary margin. If John Ruskin saw our cities today, he would weep.
I'm rambling, of course. Most of this probably just looks like hyperbole and nonsense. But, what can I say. Beauty is important to me. And there's a lot of it out there, to be sure. But perhaps the price of progress is that there's a bit less of it about than there used to be. Is it a fair tradeoff? Perhaps. I'd just like to help create a world where beauty and progress could co-exist a little more happily than they do now.
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I used to always want to do exactly what you just said, and to an extent still do 
While they are beautiful, i cannot shed tears for what is not there. I have learned to focus my attention on what is. Even though the building infront of me me look like a pile of rubbish, it does not stop my from finding what is good in something else, or perhaps finding the beauty in the pile of rubbish. Beauty is, after all, truly in the eye of the beholder.
There is also no such thing as progress. There is only change. And no change is perminent, but change is.
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Aye, that's probably the best sorta philosophy to take. The one constant in the universe is change, after all, no getting around that one.
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man i could go all day about my "philosophies of the universe." Its just really simple stuff I've learned theses past difficult two years. I just figured id share some of it.
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Wow, this IS beautiful. ^^ That perfect mix of majestic scenary and majestic archetecture, all subtly intertwined and respectful of each other. It's scenes like this that I want to incorporate into an HO layout someday. Scenes like this, too...: [link]
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where did you find that picture, and are there more like it? THATS what im talking about. Its beautiful, thank you!
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It's a painting called "Opening of the Wilderness" by a fellow called Thomas Pritchard Rossiter, and it was painted 1857-ish-- notably a decade BEFORE the transcontinental railroad was finished. I find it endlessly fascinating how he imagined the railroad in a fictional and completely un-tamed wild landscape, a vision of the future and change that juxtaposed machine and nature more closely than they would actually find themselves in real life... who today would expect to see (or have seen??) an entire roundhouse of live steam locomotives isolated in a forested mountain range...??
I found it in a book called "Art in the Age of Steam," and although there was a fair amount of interesting railroad art contained within, I don't recall there being more works by this guy conveying such a fascinating environment. I'd actually been meaning to show you that painting for a while, though, because by looking at your own work I thought that you might like it.
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Indeed I do like it very much. Its funny that I should feel the way I do towards man, machine and nature. Most people who are into machinery are only into it and do not pay any attention or appreciation towards the wilderness, same goes for nature folk too ^_^ I for one appreciate both on the same level, different but the same.
Trains, and soon to follow - steam - had been a part of my life for a LONG time. It wasn't until I was around twelve years of age that I began to truly appreciate wilderness, much like depicted in that picture. I had joined boy scouts at that age and boy did we do a lot of camping in the foothills of new hampshire/maine. Fresh air, beautiful scenery and a sense of order amongst the potential chaos of the piney/hardwood forests really opened up something inside of me. Alas, amongst all these campouts, I always wished there was a steam locomotive that happened to be there, much like the ones I draw; not usually the huge ones, but the smallerβ¦errmmm, more cape gauge like engines. Being machines that are so elemental, they fit so darn well in the kind of environment that I spent so much time in (esp if they burned wood or charcoal.)
I could give you an awesome story, but I'll just pm you if ur interested in that thing cuz im tired and my eyes are about to roll out of my head from looking at this computer screen for the past 3 hours XD.
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