(The following story by Kevin Kittredge appeared on the Roanoke Times website on May 7.)
ROANOKE, Va. — They took pictures of cows, parades, newborn chicks, football games, bathing beauties, the Hotel Roanoke – and, oh yeah, trains.
Unlike O. Winston Link, who now has a museum dedicated to his work, the staff photographers of the Norfolk and Western Railway have remained mostly anonymous.
But the pictures they snapped over decades form a history of the railroad and the life around it in some ways as compelling as Link’s.
Certainly they took more photographs than Link. At times as many as eight of them traveled the N&W rails, photographing ribbon cuttings, company-owned buildings, new locomotives, railroad employees and their families and much, much more – some of it now a little hard to fathom. Context is often lacking in the picture captions, leaving large questions. (Just why were those cows in the Hotel Roanoke ballroom, after all?)
Said Don Piedmont, retired public relations director for N&W’s successor, Norfolk Southern, of the collection: “It’s extraordinary in very many ways.”
The photographs – 35,000 of them – are now part of the special collections department at Virginia Tech’s Newman Library. The department, located off the library’s main lobby, is a kind of catch-basin for historical curios, including an alleged piece of Abraham Lincoln’s casket and Charlotte Bronte’s Bible .
The photos are only a part of the library’s vast railway collection, created by N&W in 1981 and enhanced with donations from Norfolk Southern after N&W merged with Southern Railway. In addition to the photographs there are boxes and boxes of railroad timetables, records and ledger books – 1,300 cubic feet in all.
But it is the photographs that command the attention – especially now, with the opening of the Link museum in January. Perhaps a third of the railroad photographs, or more than 10,000, can be viewed online, said Gail McMillan, director of Tech’s digital library and archives. (imagebase.lib.vt.edu. Search for “Norfolk and Western.”)
McMillan remembered reading about Link’s famous photos and the way he highlighted people as well as trains.
“I thought, ‘Oh, we have faces, too.'”
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Many of the photographs are of Roanoke, headquarters of N&W, and the surrounding countryside. There are Roanoke farms, a Roanoke poultry operation (complete with a pretty model and lots and lots of baby chicks), the Roanoke airport. Many are portraits, “each of which is almost a story in itself,” Piedmont said. There are aerial views of Roanoke from half a century ago.
There are photographs of the 1929 Thanksgiving Parade, with the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets winding past the N&W office buildings and across the railroad tracks.
There are more than a hundred photographs of the Hotel Roanoke: The Hotel Roanoke in snow, the Hotel Roanoke Christmas tree, the Hotel Roanoke lobby, an infinity of Hotel Roanoke rooms, that weird cattle auction in the 1960s and the Hotel Roanoke in flames in 1898.
And, of course, there are trains. Lots and lots of trains – including some dazzling shots of trains winding through mountain valleys. Many of the photographs in the collection were originally used for N&W Magazine, Piedmont said. Others were used for color calendars and advertisements. The railroad used its own photographers for all these things.
“Time and convenience were part of it,” Piedmont said. “If you want it done right, do it at home, was pretty much the theory.” (Link, for the record, was never an N&W staff photographer – he took his photographs with the railroad’s permission on his own time and at his own expense.)
Though the photographers never received credit individually – it was not the railroad’s way – Piedmont recalled several of their names: Joe Stanley, Gene Wiley, Frank Rader, Jim Tucker, Aubrey Overstreet. At least a few are still around, including Michael Bickham, now manager of imaging services for Norfolk Southern in Norfolk..
Bickham said the railroad sent its photo archives to Tech’s library because it had no decent space for storing them itself. Some of the negatives were in file cabinets near steam radiators, which was speeding their deterioration.
There were other advantages to a college library. Though the railroad often lent its negatives to rail buffs, Virginia Tech has made the collection available to virtually anyone – especially now that many of the photographs are online. The rest of the photos, as well as the voluminous railway records, can be found in the special collections department.
The public is welcome. Indeed, said McMillan, students who do research on the railroad collection are fairly rare.
“We get all kinds of users,” she said. Most are rail buffs; many are enthralled by railroad bridges. “Either they’re building model railroads or they’re out there walking around trying to find where the bridges were.”
The railroad collection, including all the pictures, is still the property of Norfolk Southern, McMillan stressed. “We don’t own them. We possess them.” People who want to reproduce the photos must obtain permission from the railroad first – although McMillan has never heard of anyone being turned down.
In any event, “Our role isn’t to preserve them and hide them,” she said of the materials. “It’s to preserve them and make them available.”
Virginia Tech industrial design professor Bill Green, who used photographs from the collection to help with the recent renovation of the N&W passenger station here, is a fan. “We were able to find all kinds of stuff about the train station. It’s a great place to come in and discover stuff,” he said.
Others agree – but note the collection is not perfect. Many of the photographs are documented poorly, if at all. What to make, for example, of that line of bathing beauties holding bows and arrows on an ocean beach, dated 1932?
“Archery practice, bathing beauties, Virginia Beach, Virginia,” says the caption. Their relation to the railroad is left unexplained.
Piedmont speculated that the photo was an N&W travel advertisement. Bickham said such information was not always written down. “What can I say?”
Others said the collection might benefit from a special railroad curator, who could identify all the locomotives with authority and give the other pictures context.
Such a project may have to wait for better days for education budgets.
Meanwhile, some say serendipity is part of the collection’s charm.
“You never know what you’re going to find,” McMillan said.