Dgwphotos

A few of my other IR images. A goal post at a nearby elementary school A picnic table at the same school An old tree at a nearby park.

The railroad was an important part of the mining operations and the town of Newcastle, as it was at other coal mining operations in the state. It provided the important function of transporting the coal to the market, and the connection to the outside world. Orginally built as the Seattle and Walla Walla, it was Seattle's first railroad and eventually connected all of the coal mining communities in King County, including Franklin, Black Diamond, and Renton. It later became the Columbia and Puget Sound, then the Pacific Coast Railroad, reflecting its purchase by the Pacific Coast Company. This is all that remains of the turntable which was used to turn locomotives at the Coal Creek end of the railroad, just a concrete pad with some bolt sticking out of it. There was another larger turntable at the Seattle end of the railroad. These are the footings that supported the bunker which was used to load coal cars to transport the coal to Seattle. This concrete foundation supported a large ...

The town of Newcastle was orginally located near the current Newcastle Nursery, east of the present town, where the original mine was located. The town later moved up the Coal Creek canyon to what is now the Red Town Trailhead of Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park. The area had been previously known as Coal Creek, but became Newcastle when the Post Office moved from the old town site. Red Town was a neighborhood where the houses were all painted red. Other neighborhoods were were known as Rainbow Town and Finn Town. Some of the houses came from Franklin, when that town was abandoned. The town disappeared when the major mining operations shut down in the 1920's and 30's. This dam provided water for the town site from a small creek known as Red Town Creek. Wooden planks that formed part of the dam can still be seen at the base of the water. This foundation supported an electrical dynamo that provided electricity for the town and the mines. It is located in the back yard of a ...

Newcastle, as it's name implies (taken from the City of Newcastle on Tyne, the famed coal mining city in England), was another important coal mining town in the early history of Washington State. The town was second only to Black Diamond in coal production in the state. Coal was mined in the region from the 1880's until 1963, though large scale production ended in the 1930's. Like Black Diamond and Franklin, it was a company town, orignally owned by the Oregon Improvement Company, which also owned Franklin (Black Diamond was founded by the Black Diamond Coal Company, which had previously mined near Nortonville, CA, before moving to the Pacific Northwest), which later sold both towns to the Pacific Coast Company when OIC went bankrupt. PCC also owned Black Diamond. The coal mining area is now largely a part of King County's Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park. The Ford Slope Mine was the largest producer of the Newcastle area, and operated from 1906 to 1926. The shaft...

I was able to work more on the Roslyn IR project just before graduation. I was hoping to finish up the project around September, but was never able to do so. (Hopefully I will be able to do so this spring, as Roslyn's snowed in right now.) I'm not sure what this structure was, but it bears some resemblance to a fan house, though it's much smaller, and there is no exhaust vent or housing for the fan itself. It's near the site of the No.1 and No.2 mines. This is another unknown foundation from the site of the No.1 and No.2 mines. This structure is the concrete tunnel that made up part of the No. 3 mine in Ronald, a small town about two miles from Roslyn, and also owned and operated by the Northwest Improvment Company as part of the Roslyn coal field. The shaft appears to have been closed by the Federal Office of Surface Mining by knocking the shaft down. (I've seen a photo of this shaft in its original configuration on Ghosttowns.com.) I like the quality of the IR tha...

I'm presently still working on shooting images for the Newcastle IR project, as well. I've already shot two rolls, and started a third one today, as some images needed to be reshot, and there were a few new ones. I'm also testing a possible replacement for Kodak High Speed Infrared (known as HIE) under the same conditions as I am shooting with HIE. The film I'm testing is Rollei IR400, which is not as sensitive as the HIE, and I've heard that it requires a stronger IR filter (which is quite expensive), so I'm testing how well it responds with the normal (for HIE) Red 25 filter.

I was able to get up to Roslyn the weekend before Memorial day and shoot a roll of HIE . Unfortunatly, I lost half the roll to sandwiching during the processing, so I was only able to print a few shots from the roll. This is some type of coal processing machinery at the site of the #3 mine, near Ronald. I'm hoping that I can head up again on Monday to try to redo some of the lost shots, as well as some areas that I wasn't able to reach. It depends on whether I'm able to finish my final project for my photo class on Saturday (which is looking good on the progress), however.

Franklin is a ghost town just east of Black Diamond, WA, built to mine coal in the Green River Gorge. The town was abandoned in the 1920's, and only foundations, a disorganized and overgrown cemetery, and a 1300 foot deep shaft (grated) remain. While exploring the area, I came up with the idea to return with Kodak High Speed Infrared Film (now sadly discontinued), and these are the resulting images. I entered them in the 2008 King County Fair, and won two blue ribbons for the Mine Cart and Headstone 2 images and four red ribbons for the others. The mine cart: This was a hoist foundation, which pulled the mine carts from the mine in the hillside across from the foundation: This was the power plant that supplied power to the mines: This structure carried a water pipe for the town: Finally, a couple of images from the cemetary: All photos were taken with a Nikon FM and 19-35mm Tamron lens, on Kodak High Speed Infrared film, and printed in my darkroom on Ilford Multigrade paper.