Ralph Carlson was an avid railfan living in the Rio Grande Valley. Ralph had a vending machine business and many of the machines he owned where placed in the waiting rooms of the depots. Ralph carried a camera with his while on his routes to filling his peanut and candy machines and captured Missouri Pacific locomotives, trains and depots on film from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. One would write Ralph a letter inquiring about certain subjects, you’d get a response on what he had and the costs per print (I seem to remember 25 cents was the going rate). He only made contact prints and only in the milder months as his home wasn’t air conditioned. I was traveling quite a lot to Brownsville and Harlingen in the late 1970’s due to the boom in rail traffic to and from Mexico so I was able to visit Ralph a few times and pick out negatives for him to later print. I also saw his Missouri Pacific HO layout that was housed in a dedicated building behind his house. His locomotives were all modified to resemble a Missouri Pacific prototype. He’d take a wheel arrangement that may have started as a PRR locomotive and file off the non-Mopac areas off the boiler. He’d then take lead solder and drip in in the areas where the sand and steam domes where and file the lead until it resembled the Mopac versions. After Ralph passed away A. T. Kott was able to convince the Denver Public Library to take his negative collection but as of this writing they haven’t scanned any of the negatives. Here’s what they have on their web site about his collection

https://archives.denverlibrary.org/repositories/3/resources/8364

The images below were in Bill Hanson’s collection. Ralph must have mailed them to him in the 1970’s.

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