(The following article by Amy Brecount White was posted on the Washington Post website on March 3.)
WASHINGTON — Roanoke is a lonesome train kind of town. Wander its renovated downtown streets and you’re bound to hear a freight rumble through, bearing a load of who-knows-what to a warehouse who-knows-where. The engines are diesel now, instead of steam, and the modern air horn isn’t quite as high and plaintive as the old steam whistles that used to shriek up and down Roanoke Valley. But Roanoke hasn’t forgotten that earlier, more dramatic time of the big locomotive. The city’s Historic Rail District has been almost completely renovated; a former freight depot has become the train-rich Virginia Museum of Transportation; and the old Norfolk & Western (N&W) passenger station now houses the O. Winston Link Museum, an unparalleled collection of photography and sound recordings from the region’s age of steam.
The station-turned-museum, which opened in January, is alive with sounds gone by — the bells, whistles and chugs of steam engines. Initially, the man who should be known as the Ansel Adams of train photography was better known for his railroad sound recordings. Push a button to elicit that industrial music.
Books, calendars and magazines (displayed in a case) often featured Link’s shots, and chances are you’ve seen one. Some of his images, like the engines they captured, have attained a nearly mythic status. Peer into one case and the Hogwarts Express barrels toward you. (A Link photo graced a British version of the first Harry Potter book.)
An innovative kiosk lets you experiment with lighting three of Link’s night photographs. Visitors can turn a light in a window on and off to see how one detail affects the overall composition. What if you backlit this or took out that set of lights? Link got it right in every shot.
Link loved the idea of his iconic train pictures being here. Before he died in 2001, he approved the museum’s location because it gave his photos just the right context. It was from Roanoke that he began most of his train-shooting trips as the enthusiastic chronicler of a fading era. And from the old observation deck, you can still look eastward to the workshops where the N&W made its engines.
Roanoke, surrounded by gentle mountains, is just a friendly and picturesque place. Outdoor vendors hawk everything from fresh meat to tie-dye at the historic downtown farmers’ market. In addition to the Link Museum, the Center in the Square complex boasts enough museums and theaters (including the Science Museum of Western Virginia) to keep train buff and non-buff alike happy for a weekend.
With the railroad setting outside and the museum minutiae inside the Link Museum, it’s easy to feel immersed in life along the old N&W, as Link himself was from 1955 to 1960.
He took nearly 2,500 shots of the trains and their people in that half-decade. About 300 of them are on display here in six small galleries named after N&W divisions. The most famous — and striking — are the ones photographed at night.
On one level, Link’s photos are documentation. But there is something transcendent and timeless about them, too. You know, as you gaze into the eyes of a proud conductor dwarfed by his shining engine or as you walk in on station agent Gladys Harriger stitching up a quilt between trains at White Top, that the era is gone forever. The photos are nostalgic and personal and deep, both in their subject matter and texture.
Like the more famous Adams, Link achieved a wide range of tones. To call the photographs “black-and-white” seems inadequate. Link “sculpted with light,” as one museum text states.
“Winston was driven to create a vision of America as he might like it to be or as he might wish to remember,” Thomas H. Garver, one of Link’s assistants on the train project, said in a phone interview from his office in Wisconsin. In communicating this vision, Link left nothing to chance. There’s nothing candid about these shots. In one famous image, “Hotshot, Eastbound,” the cozy couple watching a drive-in movie while the train passes is posed in Link’s own convertible.
Link never studied photography, but when he completed an engineering degree during the Depression, there were few jobs. He took one as a commercial photographer and became known for clever, eye-catching scenes used in advertisements for, among others, Texaco and B.F. Goodrich. On an assignment to Virginia, he detoured to nearby Waynesboro to photograph the night arrival of an N&W train at the station just for himself. Growing up in Brooklyn, Link had always loved the puffing giants, and he lamented the coming of the diesel age.
He sent his photos to N&W headquarters and received permission to take more. In all, Link made 21 trips from his New York home to N&W lines. He devoted part of the next five years, his talents and about $20,000 of his own money to immortalize the hulking, noble engines before they disappeared forever.
“What Winston did is a fascinating combination of a commercial point of view brought to a documentary subject,” said Garver, who is the organizing curator of the museum. “He understood how to create an image that would capture your attention.”
While Adams was at the mercy of Mother Nature for his lighting, Link took absolute control. “I can’t move the sun, and I can’t even move the tracks,” Link once said. Shooting at night was a way, albeit difficult, to control every aspect of a scene, even if it took days to set up. Link thought nothing of constructing a platform on a roof to hold his equipment or of shooting from a signal bridge. The N&W once held a train to give him time to change his flashbulbs.
You can’t help but admire Link’s technical virtuosity as you examine his equipment and absorb the thorough explanations of his techniques. Link usually had three cameras shooting, one shot apiece. His “synchronized flash system” of as many as 60 flashbulbs sometimes required three-quarters of a mile of electrical cable to power it. He built large flash reflectors that held as many as 18 bulbs each. Using a souped-up car battery, he could illuminate pitch darkness with 50,000 watts for a mere moment — just enough to “freeze” a train traveling 60 mph forever on film.
Link preferred to shoot in winter because the cold made the steam more visible and foliage didn’t obscure the view of the trains. To find startling shots, he would interview workers or drive along the tracks in North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.
He got to know the people and the benevolent omnipresence of a grand old railroad in a part of the country that loved, and still loves, a good train.