These photos were sent to me by an NMRA member, who received them in an email.  We have traced them back as far as we can, but all attempts to locate the photographer have been fruitless.  As they were clearly made in the late 1800's, we are presuming that they will be out of copyright.

If anyone can produce compelling evidence to the contrary, I will happily remove them.

They appear to have been taken around the Newcastle area.  There are no obvious links between them, so they may well be part of a larger collection.  Going by the cracks in some of them, they would have been glass plates.

What impressed me is the clarity and definition from what today is considered ancient technology.

I'll put the names above the photos for easier reading.

0 6 0 loco 62XX



Aberdare Colliery



B205 class loco 238



B 205 class loco 317



B Pit Merewether NSW 24 Feb 1899



BLW-NSWGR K 294 Toronto NSW



Construction of coal stage at Port Warratah



Cooperative Colliery Wallsend NSW



D 255 class loco 263 Honeysuckle NSW



E 10 class loco Toronto NSW



F 351 class loco 361



Greta Coliery GRETA NSW



Hetton Wheelers picnic and E 10



J and A Brown's works HEXHAM NSW




J Hayes and E 10 Z 20 loco



Kings Wharf Newcastle - looking East



Merewether Beach steam tram terminus



Port Warratah roundhouse CARRINGTON NSW



Steam tram Tudor Street, HAMILTON



Stockton ballast grounds



The end of the dyke - Newcastle



The pit at Newcastle NSW 1890 - 1900



The ship - Norfolk Island



I hope you have found them interesting.

Really good pictures there Max, I am amazed at the sharpness of each one.

They certainly show how tough life was back then.

The number of loco,s in Carrington and the number of sailing ships is a surprise too.

Size matters! I think the good quality is because of the large format the cameras had. And of course the price of equipment and material made sure that only skilled persons took the photos.

A great set of photos! Thank you very much for sharing!

What is clearly shown in the photos is the clothes of the persons. I am collecting rolling stock for SR in the 20s and I can buy more ready to run rolling stock of the highest quality than I can afford bt where are the people from Preiser, Hornby, Bachmann? I have only found some figures in the Preiser range but nowhere neare enough to populate even my small layout. Even for the 40s, 50s for example I would need more male figures wearing a hat if the photos in my books are typical. But I think in the UK it was the same as in Austria that in the past you did not go out of house without hat.

Thomas

I'm glad you like them, lads.  I'm hoping Dave will be along to shed some light on the locations as he's kind of local.

Great set of photos, I really enjoyed them thanks Max :thumbs 

You're welcome, Ian.  What I found interesting was that the locos at the Port Warratah  roundhouse are all facing in.  I would have expected them to be turned around so their chimneys were under the vent pipes for re-setting the fires.

Maybe they had more vents on the other side.

Great set of photos. Thanks for sharing them, Max.

One thing that struck me, apart from the locos, was the shipping. The couple of photos of the docks show a huge number of ships and of course they are virtually all sailing ships. I think we take engine power for granted today. Imagine the difficulty of steering large sail ships like those amongst so many others.

I see sailors getting into enough trouble in the local yacht havens with their little 40ft craft, and then they are still using engines to manoeuvre!

Hi,

Those are good thanks for putting them up. The clarity is expected - they are plate camera photos; with long exposures and fine (for the time) emulsion, and then developed by experts.

That equipment is what was used for 'builders photos', digital photos are good but cannot get anywhere near the definition of either 35mm camera or and even more so photos like yours; but digital have other advantages; I am certain that you would not want to lug about a full glass plate camera or wait for the exposure time!

The very large plate cameras used for 'view' used to be carted about by a mule - or possibly the smaller donkey.

Addition  Try the following link for something like the camera would have been -

http://www.dtristramludwig.com/collection.html

another link gives a size of 6.5 a 11 inches which I think is a bit small!  W Jackson in the USA used 11" x 14": they needed the following transport -  one mule (burro) for the camera and one for the glass plates, well wrapped and secured, and perhaps one for him as well.  These glass plates were used as scrap, having removed the negative , for greenhouses!

Here is the sort of pack that was used in the USA

http://digital.denverlibrary.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15330coll22/id/39110/rec/9

Another link  of a whopper!  

http://uncommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html

and a final one

http://www.flickr.com/photos/becca3k/3164014819/





 

Yours Peter

Great historical photographs Max and that universal moustache all the men grew puts an immediate time stamp on the period. Something which should be helpful to modellers of the era.

Great photos Max,I never tire of looking at old photos,particularly turn of the century up to Edwardian times.Some lovely locos in among that lot too!

Cheers,John.B.:thumbs

Thanks, guyz.  It was a bit of a marathon.  Thanks for those links as well, Peter.  Very interesting reading.  :thumbs

I hope you have found them interesting.

 

Most certainly have!!

A fantastic set of photos Max - absolutely brilliant in every way - the locations, the history, the ships, the clothes, the very strange loco layout (I thought 1 of them was a 2-4-0 but it appears the "2" is a pair of small wheels rather than a bogie) and the quality is stunning.

As others have said, they would be taken on a "large format" plate camera - probably a 10 x 8.  When I worked in photography in the early 80's, we used a 10 x 8 for studio shots - almost impossible to lug around - and the quality was out of the is world.

I also agree with Peterbunce in that a high quality film camera will always produce better results than a digital camera.  These shots are a fine example.  They're old, probably some of them are glass plates, the cameras were old, the film emulsions were crude but the results are truly fantastic.

I'm going back to them for another "study" - I may be gone some time ……………………….:cheers

! could spend my life looking at old photographs

Yes, Peter the F 351 has two fixed undriven wheels at the front.  Unusual, but it seems to look "right."

Cracking pictures, Max.
Well, not literally.
Thanks for sharing them.
I hope they are being preserved in an archive somewhere.

Thanks, Pete.  They just appeared in an email out of the blue.  We're still checking.