Saturday, September 10, 2016

Sepia Saturday 343 : Working On Inverse Relationships


Our theme this month on Sepia Saturday is "Work And Play".  I will start with work - weren't we always taught that work came before play? - and with these two fine fellows who are obviously kitted-out for a day on the footplate. I have no idea who they are: running, as I do, a home for orphaned old photographs, people often hand me old photographs whose provenance has been long forgotten.  By posing in front of the insignia of their employer we have a good idea of what they did and - because it is "British Railways" and not British Rail nor one of the handful of silly names rail companies now posses - when they did it.

There are no doubt experts out there who will be able to tell us more (feel free to write in, I am a magnet for trivia) by examining the cap badges or the bogey wheels or identifying the precise meaning of what appears to be an Amazon Dash button on the shirt of the cheap on the right. But I love photos for their own intrinsic value and sometimes there is an inverse relationship between added information and added visual value. There should be  a mathematical formula to express that relationship - I will play around with the idea and see if I can work one out.

To see what others are doing with work and play, go to the Sepia Saturday Blog and follow the links.

7 comments:

  1. I like the way you think Alan.

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  2. Have to love those identifiers in unknown photos.

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  3. Perhaps they were singing the old song, 'I've been working on the railroad, all the livelong day'.

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  4. Had to look up" footplate" and "bogie." Here's my formula: IV=AVV/AI x imagination/#google searches (#comments on post/Sepia Saturday post#). This is similar to the formula used by our Infernal Revenue Service to decide who they are going to audit. Works like a charm for all things real and imagined.

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  5. Oh now Jo's done it! All I can think of is the titles of songs about trains: "Chattanooga Choo Choo", "The A Train", "Wabash Cannonball", "Casey Jones", "The Acheson, Topeka, and the Santa Fe" . . . help!

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  6. The value of a Sepia photo, instead of one in color, is that it emphasizes the patina of grime, grease, oil, and coal dust that these two men wore proudly every working day.

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  7. Great find, even if a bit anonymous! There are 2 working train engineers, or brakemen, definitely not conductors. Though I'm using terms I learned in the US, I would imagine Britain had similar jobs, though now you all have more passenger travel than we do. At least here in the southeastern US, there're just freight trains around me.

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