“Tom’s Pics Germany 1945-1965” – this is how I announced the posts from 11. Nov. 2023 to 14. Apr. 2024.


With small changes I have presented the pictures with the following text in the Historical Forum of Drehscheibe-Online:


Quote
These pictures are not from my collection. They are from the collection of Thomas Wilson. Tom didn't take any of those photos himself!

Thomas Wilson is a railroad friend from the USA who photographed steam locomotives in operation in his native country back in the 1950s. He left me his negative collection of about 200 railway and tram motifs from the years 1945 to 1965 with reference to Germany. He wants the pictures to be preserved in a meaningful way for the future.

The black and white negatives mainly have a size of approx. 11 x 6.5 cm. Tom bought or exchanged these negatives from various trading partners. The names of the photographers are not known. Since the photographs were taken mostly in the area of the then American occupation zone, I suspect that the photographer or photographers were employed in the American military service.

For the publication of some pictures here in the forum, I used the digitization on a lighted console with smartphone and Snapseed as editing software at the beginning, because my Nikon LS-5000 ED can not cope with this format. In the meantime, I photograph the negatives from the light console with my digital camera in macro mode, transfer them to the PC and edit them with Photoshop Elements. I hope that the motifs from that time will excuse the lack of quality.

I will gladly take up and pass on additional information to the pictures shown.

After complete capture and digitization, I will make the scanned files available for download to all interested parties. A corresponding announcement and link will then appear to the last post.

After that, I'm going to hand over the negatives to the Railway Foundation.

Many greetings
Siegmar
Unquote

The picture shows Tom with (his cameras and) his wife Kathy on 04. 10. 2004 during a coffee break opposite the stop Garftitz during a visit to the Molli on Rügen together with two of my railway friends.

I am impressed by the quality and motifs of these pictures. In addition to razor-sharp photographs from the end of the Second World War from regions occupied by the Americans, the camera shots from the 50s and 60s with the typical railway atmosphere at that time inspire me.

Again and again there were references to already exactly the same or slightly different existing images when compared with the pictures I presented.

The discussion of whether they are originals or duplicates will probably not be clear for all pictures. (As a comfortable person with consistently good manual camera adjustment skills, I would have simply pressed the shutter button several times in the same place instead of working with additional equipment to take pictures. )

Personally, I don't think it's so important for me as long as all these old recordings are available to as many interested people as possible.

Therefore, as a thank you to all forum participants for the many details and hints I made the scans of the pictures available for download with the link below.

 I have incorporated many of the received information into the Excel table, which is also available for download.