On the Road: Interlude and Part 4

L read over my most recent post and pointed out that I hadn’t bothered to explain why I was chasing trains all over Virginia and North Carolina. I realized she was right, so let’s stop a minute and explain what I’m up to.

In 1955 a New York photographer named O. Winston Link began a personal project to document the final years of steam on the Norfolk & Western Railway, then the last Class One railroad to use steam power exclusively. The initial conceits of his project were that he would work at night, and that each photo would contain a railroad employee, to give human interest. The road’s management had their imagination caught by the idea, and gave Link unprecedented and almost limitless co-operation. For the next five years, up to the very end of steam on the N&W in 1960, he made periodic trips to Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina to photograph a vanishing way of life, both technological and social, sinking $20,000 of his own money (more than $125,000 in today’s dollars) into the project.

The photographs sat mostly unseen for twenty-five years, until somebody at Harry Abrams saw them and thought they would make a good coffee-table book. Steam, Steel and Stars was published in 1987 and was an immediate success, reviving Link’s reputation and raising his visibility to the point that there is now a museum in Roanoke, Virginia dedicated to his work, the only museum in the US representing the work of one photographer.

Steam-head that I am, I own Steam, Steel and Stars and its companion, The Last Steam Railroad in America, and I had an ambition to go and see whether I could find the places where Link took his pictures, and see how fifty-five years have changed them, so L arranged our vacation to give me time to do just that. And that is what all the pictures are about.

There’s not a lot to say about Monday; it was a lot of driving combined with a certain amount of getting lost, interrupted by stops for picture-taking.

I began the day with a detour away from the N&W, heading instead for the C&O in Staunton.

Staunton, Virginia passenger station, built in 1857, burned by the Union army in 1864, rebuilt after the war, demolished by a runaway train in 1890, rebuilt again in 1902. It was later converted into a restaurant, which has since closed.

The main waiting room, restaurantized

Standpipe for watering locomotives at the Staunton station. It’s wildly uncommon to find one of these surviving.

Interior of the general store at Vesuvius, Virginia, 1957

Vesuvius general store, 2012. The gravity-feed gas pump that stood out front (they kept it because the electric gas pump was vulnerable to power failures) was bought by a fan and is now at the Link Museum in Roanoke.