When the last steam engine train puffed its last tower of white smoke, O. Winston Link may have been there to capture the end of an era.
The photographer, who spent five years photographing the Norfolk and Western Railroad between 1955 and 1960, was the topic of discussion at the Fairfax Station Railroad Museum's annual meeting Monday night, March 26, courtesy of Bill and Ellen Arnold, curators of the O. Winston Link Museum of Roanoke, which displays Link's work.
"To find the best places to make a photograph, Mr. Link would ride the entire length of the journey up one side and down on the other," said Bill Arnold, clicking through slides of Link's photography. "When he'd make a photograph, he'd use flashbulbs ... as many as 60 of them, all synchronized to go off at the same time, so he could get as much depth as possible into the negative."
The photographs he took were mostly done in black and white and taken at night, often involving people who lived in the vicinity of a railroad station, Arnold said. Link wanted to make the photographs as personal as possible and reflective of the "local flavor" in the small towns across central Virginia.
A native Brooklyn, N.Y., Link would plan out and sometimes set up some of the photographs he took to ensure everything turned out exactly the way he wanted it, Arnold said.
One of the more well-known photographs is of a train chugging past a drive-in. Arnold said Link had to superimpose the movie onto the drive-in screen using two other negatives, because the light from the flashbulbs gave too much of a glare to catch the scene when the picture was taken.
"Yes, Mr. Link shot the steam railroad and he preserved steam railroads, but he also preserved a way of life," Arnold said.
IN ANOTHER photograph, Link photographed a group of men inside a general store near a station. Arnold said the store, which has since closed, was recreated inside the Link Museum, which opened in 2004.
Collected and catalogued in the museum's vault are more than 2,400 negatives of images Link took in that five year stretch, at the end of the steam engine railroad era. All the negatives have been sealed in acid-free sleeves for safe keeping, Arnold said.
The Arnolds first met Link at a National Railroad Historic Society conference in 1987, when Link was the keynote speaker and filled a 1,700-person capacity room to the rafters, Arnold said.
"He said he didn't want to talk but they gave him 30 minutes," Arnold said. "After 45 minutes, we had to have him wrap things up."
Ellen Arnold said Link was a generous man who wanted to be authentic with the images he loved.
"He liked faces, but he said it was too hard to capture them, so he photographed trains," she said.
Joan Rogers, executive director of the Fairfax Station Railroad Museum, said she was pleased with the Allen's stories about Link.
"I think we all learned a lot about him and his work," she said. "We have some posters of his photographs here in the museum."
Terry and Jan Bender made the trip from Great Falls to hear the presentation, which combined his love of trains with her love of photography.
"For us, this is the perfect evening," Jan Bender said. "The really special thing about his photos is the lighting. People have no idea how much work it takes to make a good photograph, you have to really understand an awful lot about lighting and timing and exposure to do it right."
Terry Bender said he was impressed to learn about Link's dedication to recording the images of people with the trains.
"They said he had a good relationship with the conductors and you have to wonder how he did that," he said. "He had keys to the telephone boxes along the tracks."
Both said they enjoyed the presentation and wanted to take a trip to Roanoke in the near future to learn more.
"There must have been something personal for him to come down from Westchester County to photograph these trains," Terry Bender said.