To order, Trains Go To War, visit: KalmbachHobbyStore.com
Video Transcription courtesy of YouTube.
[NARRATOR] Rob I’d like to I’d like to ask you to talk about something later on in the issue — that’s about railroads in Vietnam.
It’s a really interesting story one of our longtime authors, I think Jerry Pinkepank …
[ROB MCGONIGAL] Correct, Jerry Pinkepank, yep.
[NARRATOR] And he was in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, the U.S. war with Vietnam in 1960s and 70s, and he was able to follow the railroad and take pictures. I think he was railfanning Vietnam railways at war, which is a bit unusual to me.
[MCGONIGAL] Right, correct Jerry was in the U.S. Army in in communications. He wasn’t directly involved with the railroad but he was a student of railroads and worked professionally in the railroad industry before he went overseas and took a great interest in the operations, and together with information and photographs supplied by Paul Stephanus, who was a commercial news photographer, they put together this magnificent actually two-part article about Vietnam railways and they ran… the two parts ran in trains magazine in 1969.
The first part was pretty much the history of Vietnam railways up until hostilities really heated up in the 1950s and this — part two — the one that we reprinted in here in our special issue picks up there and talks about the the railway as it was impacted by the war.
And also the weather, there were, I didn’t realize this, but the railway the Vietnam railway was in terrible shape partly because of some terrific hurricanes that struck the country in the 1960s. So a lot of the handicap that the U.S. and Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, forces were dealing with was really due the weather, not just enemy action.
I was U,S Army stationed at Tan Son Nhut, about 10 Klms. from downtown Saigon, 12/62-12/63. Early 1963, I would hear the shrill whistle of a steam engine in the middle of the night as it traveled north of its terminus (Saigon). By mid-’63, for what it’s worth, that nightly sound was no more. The VC were known to use explosives on bridges and trestles during that period.
What Bruce said, all of your video stuff is really low rent and obviously no one cares as it’s gone on this way for years.
1969-1970 I never saw one square inch of that railroad that wasn’t in shambles at least in the Chu Lai Quang Ni AO. My impression was that it was bombed out. We did have a typhoon in 1969 but as long as I was there it was totally unserviceable. Pretty sure it ran parallel to Highway One.
This is the same video you ran last month. While the audio content is great, the video stinks. This would be far better ran as a podcast. As you are aware, I have pointed out the obvious amateurish aspects of this video. The entire sequence shot from an obscure side angle. This could have been corrected with an over the shoulder shot from the interviewers viewpoint with a few necessary close ups of the magazine article.
This is an embarrassment. A first quality magazine like TRAINS running poorly constructed videos.
It doesn’t take fancy equipment to make good videos, it just takes knowledge of how to use it.
Again, this doesn’t bode well as advertisement for the DVDs that you have for sale.
1964 in Vietnam, have photo of myself at derail of engine.