Southern Locations

The Illinois Central Gulf criss-crossed my childhood like an orange-white-gray patchwork blanket. Everywhere we went as a family in Louisiana and Mississippi, the ICG always seemed nearby. Trips into the city of New Orleans meant spotting transfer runs coming east from Mays Yard. Rides over to Pontchatoula to see my father's relatives meant catching mainline hotshots coming off the Lake and heading north on the double-track IC main my great uncle helped to build. When my mother would drop me at the Hammond depot to catch a northbound City of New Orleans to Jackson, I would always see freights rumbling by the station or coming off the Baton Rouge district. I always knew to press my nose against the glass on the right side of my coach car come McComb, Mississippi, to see what ICG power was tied down at the diesel shops. Visits to my grandmother in Jackson always included my dad and I slipping away from family gatherings to see what was happening down at Capital Yard. I bet we clocked a hundred miles running up and down the length of those tracks over the years. I saw many a Paducah-rebuilt SW14 lashup flat switching cuts of cars for hours on end. Occasionally we'd get over to Bogalusa, within smell of the massive paper mill, to see what ICG power was switching the facilities that month. And of course my beloved Shore Line branch: always host to a well-worn Paducah rebuild and a string of cars, twice a week.

And so I was seeing the southern end of the ICG all of the time as a kid. I loved the creamsicle colors and fell in love with their first send second generation B-B road power. However, I wasn't yet in the discipline of taking photos. A few, yes. Dad, a few more when we were out and about. And of course we regularly documented whatever was coming into to Covington on the locals in my hometown. But looking back now on the ICG years, we didn't take enough time to document what we were seeing all around us. The return of the "Illinois Central," with its solid black paint and white death star logos — it somehow snuck up on us. By the time I got to high school, the orange and white I loved was quickly going away. So where many of the secondary lines we followed. Lucky for me now, our old south Louisiana friend Michael Palmieri was taking a lot of great photos in those years. I've known Mike since his son Christopher and I were boys riding trains with our dads with the Southeast Louisiana NRHS chapter. That's dad, Mike, and I (below) posed with an Illinois Central Gulf caboose on a Gloster Southern fantrip with our NRHS friends; my dad is kneeling at the coupler and Mike is standing behind him. I'm in the stairwell.

Thanks to the internet, we've kept in touch over the years. Mike is a wonderful photographer of trains and a phenomenal historian and lines and locomotives. As such, I'm so grateful to him for generously sharing his photos with me to round out our HawkinsRails' offerings in a number places where our interests and geography overlapped. That generosity is no more a blessing than here on this page. I'm so proud to offer a large sampling of his ICG images in Louisiana and Mississippi, in many of the places I haunted as a kid, with some of my own snaps sprinkled among his. Enjoy some southern Orange and White.