Dating vintage Disneyland slides/photos can be a bit of a process. Not all slides and photos have notations telling when they were shot. These rare images often come from estate sales then resold and split up on ebay, leaving any kind of historical context up to the buyer to figure out. Even if a slide has a month and year stamped on the back of the vintage cardboard mount, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the image was shot at that time. The film could have sat in the camera for months, sometimes even a year before the photographer took it to the store to be developed. In addition, sometimes duplicate slides were made, rendering the date stamp even more useless. In the end, the collector often has to rely on visual clues to discover exactly when these photos were shot. At the Main Street Train Station, the population number that hangs above the tracks can narrow things down a bit. The first number that shows up from a July 1955 slide in my collection is 5,000,000. I’m not sure how Walt came up with that number (especially since approximately 30,000 guests attended opening day), but it appears to have lasted until at least the summer of 1957. I have read that the 5,000000 mark wasn’t hit until October 1956.
From August 1956, still at 5,000,000:
Holding firm as of July 1957:
By July 28, 1958, the number had doubled to 10,000,000:
August 3, 1959, still at 10,000,000:
It would appear that at some point during August 1959, the number was increased to 15,000,000:
In this October 1959, the number remains at 15,000,000 while workers perform some maintenance on the station:
This slide, stamped October 1959, shows an increase to 18,000,000:
From November 1959, population still holding at 18,000,000 and would stay that way into the New Year:
…as seen in this photo stamped December 1959:
What would happen in the 1960s? Come back to find out in part two!
See more Disneyland population numbers at my main website.
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