A Few Words About Wordless Wednesday #127

Courtesy Max Miller, from the Pratt & Co. museum, Ivoryton, CT, collection of Peter H. Comstock.

In case you didn't recognize this week's Wordless Wednesday, it's the station area at Old Saybrook, looking west from the Rt.1/Boston Post Road overpass. It's one of those "railroady rich" scenes that just begs to be modeled - and, fortunately, I should be able to replicate most of this scene in my model of Old Saybrook. Let's take a tour "into" the photo, from left to right...

The bins and shed in the left foreground are the facilities of "The Chapman Co. Coal - Coke - Oil" (according to the sign on top of the shed, which you can't read here). I suspect that hoppers (and perhaps gondolas too?) were either dumped into chutes that would feed coal to the bottom of the shed - or maybe, during those days of cheap labor - the coal could have been unloaded by shovel & tossed into the top end of the shed. Behind the bins and shed are Chapman's oil storage tanks, and behind that is the railroad's freight house.

The main attraction though is taking place in the center of the photo: gondolas being filled with crates by the Roger Sherman Transfer Co. of East Hartford. The year is 1943 and the crates are filled with Waco CG-4A Army gliders, manufactured by the Gould Aeronautical Division of the Pratt, Read & Company, Inc. at their Deep River, CT plant. They'll be heading overseas soon - by rail - via the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad.

"Wordless Wednesday" is a quick & easy way to get a blog post done and share a cool photo - but as much as a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes often you need at least a few hundred words to describe all the cool stuff going on.

Special thanks to Max Miller for sharing this photo and especially for all the detailed background info that helps make this particular "Wordless Wednesday" so wordy after all.