Tony Reevy

O. Winston Link was a professional commercial photographer from New York. He was also a railway enthusiast, and in the middle 1950s he took to recording the disappearing American steam railway. The pinnacle of his career was the Norfolk & Western project. Working with the full cooperation of the N&W management, he set out to make formal staged photographs of the railway and its locomotives. In the course of this, he also recorded a lot of small-town America in the period, and also made pioneering advances in synchronised flash photography.

The images he made for the N&W project have become iconic images of `50s America, drawing comparison with Currier & Ives prints and Norman Rockwell's paintings. The N&W served the mining communities and industries of the Virginias, and Link's pictures also show the mines and the landscape. As a professional photographer, he was awake to contemporary trends in photojournalism, especially as portrayed in the magazines which were major vehicles for his commercial work. He was also published in enthusiast magazines of the period, and would have taken inspiration from some of the work of other enthusiast photographers who were also finding new ways of looking at their subject, such as Richard Steinheimer. Link was very much against "wedge shots", photographs where an approaching train was photographed from the three-quarter front aspect, with its train receding into the distance according to traditional perspective. Rather, Link in particular was concentrating on recording the whole railroad scene as steam began to disappear.

It is interesting that the decline of steam gave rise to similar photographic movements amongst railway photographers on different sides of the Atlantic. The end of steam in the UK some 5-10 years later saw the rise of impressionistic photographers such as Colin Gifford whose work also set out to record the whole disappearing railway environment, Working almost exclusively in black and white, these photographers all made stunning images that encapsulate their era.

Link also made a number of sound recordings and shot some film; he was looking to record the total railway environment and present that to the viewer as a multi-media experience (nowadays, an "installation"). A CD of previously unreleased recordings is included with this book.

The book is exquisitely presented, on good paper. It goes into some degree of detail over Link's life, the origins of the N&W project, the different sorts of photographs - those including railroad workers, the locomotives themselves, the railroad environment and the wider communities the N&W served - and finally goes into considerable detail over Link's equipment and working methods.

This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to photograph railways in any form; so many railway photographers, even those who claim to show "the train in its environment", are only producing "wedge shots". Those with no interest in railways will see the subject from a different viewpoint; and British enthusiasts, usually so insular, should look at this book and marvel. If you only have one book on American railways,this should be it.… (plus d'informations)

While ghost aren't the usual focus of railroad books, ghost stories are definitely a part of railroad lore. This comprehensive collection permits a detailed look at one facet of the human side of railroading-the growth and dissemination of legend. One thing that becomes immediately apparent in reading so many ghost stories back-to-back is the sameness of the stories themselves. For instance, there seems to have been an inordinate number of headless ghosts stalking various right-of-ways searching for a head lost in some horrible railroad accident. There is a sameness, too, in the needs of railroad ghosts. Unlike their brethren in other areas of society, most railroad ghosts seem to require the aid of eerie lanterns to light their way.

A compilation of stories in this manner provides entertainment as well as endless springboards for discussion about the nature and origin of ghost stories. Tony Reevy has identified at least one common thread between ghost stories of the past and stories of the present. He has collected two stories ("The Vanishing Samaritan" and "The Ghost of Grand Central") that would appear to be precursors of the modern urban myth known as "The Vanishing Hitchhiker." If one compares Reevy's book with books that document modern urban legends it becomes apparent that while the national scene has changed, the human desire for legend hasn't.

Books that document the human side of railroading are not the usual fare of railroad related publications. Books that examine the unusual lore of people who worked on the railroad are almost non-existent. If you are looking for something out of the ordinary in railroad reading this book should be considered. (Text Length - 157 pages, Total Length - 166 pages. Includes index)… (plus d'informations)