(The Associated Press circulated the following story by Chris Kahn on December 28.)
ROANOKE, Va. — Photographer O. Winston Link stuck close to the railroad in the 1950s when Norfolk & Western’s last steam locomotives were chugging through the Appalachian Mountains.
He knew it was the end of an era. With a back seat full of equipment, Link would spend hours waiting for the trains, illuminating the night with a constellation of flashbulbs that captured ghostly images of machines that exhale steam.
Link’s pictures remained in obscurity until the 1980s, when he was nearly 70, and today most of his work still hasn’t circulated past his closest admirers. But in a tribute to the trains that helped build the region and the man who photographed them, officials in Roanoke will open the O. Winston Link Museum Jan. 10 in a former passenger station near Norfolk & Western’s old headquarters.
“This is a nice way of reminding people of transportation that at one time was extremely important and kind of personal,” said museum curator Thomas Garver, who worked as Link’s assistant in the 1950s. “Now you rarely ride them.”
Before he died of a heart attack at 86 in 2001, Link had considered building a museum in Roanoke for his railroad pictures. After spending much of his career in public relations, Link considered his work on steam trains a rare act of complete independence, Garver said.
“Winston had a big enough ego to say ‘I want to… create something that stands independently and is not just advertising or documenting something for another client,’ ” Garver said.
As a commercial photographer in New York, Link specialized in pictures of quirky scenes like a woman in a bathing suit standing on blocks of ice supported by “Tuf-flex” brand glass – images that were clever enough to make it into the newspapers even though they were basically advertisements.
He saw his first steam train in Waynesboro, Va., while on assignment in 1955. Link was taking photos of an air conditioner factory. But he returned home with some additional shots of the N&W steam locomotives.
During the next five years, Link followed the steam locomotives, driving through Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, in a Buick convertible with the back seat ripped out to hold his equipment.
In all, Link took about 2,400 pictures. The locomotives in his pictures are as dominant as they were to the communities that once depended on them. Link shows steam trains stoically pulling cargo past movie theaters and swimming pools and front porches, always waving goodbye with a thick tail of steam.
Link sometimes spent days setting up his shots. He kept strict control over everything – people were always turned at just the right angle before the lights flashed.
“At night, what you’d see was pitch darkness,” Garver said. “It was one of Winston’s gifts to see how the scene would look, how the lighting would look, when it only looked that way for a few hundredths of a second.”
The O. Winston Link Museum was built in a vacant train station that was once a hub for N&W, and later Norfolk Southern after a railroad merger. Museum officials renovated the building with $6.8 million in federal, city and private grants, museum treasurer John Bradshaw said. Officials also have raised about $2 million to put toward the museum’s endowment, to further develop the museum and preserve the images.
The Link museum will eventually hold his entire collection of train pictures, said David Helmer, chairman of the museum’s development committee. Officials plan to rotate 150 original pictures in three galleries that separate the photos by their geographic location. Another 125 will stay in a storage area that’s accessible to visitors and the museum will keep all 2,400 negatives in its archives.
In addition to the pictures, the museum will display Link’s lesser known audio recordings of trains and movie footage. In addition, Bradshaw said the museum may get an additional two dozen prints that Link’s former wife Conchita may have stolen. New York police arrested Conchita Link and Winston Link’s former assistant Edward Hayes in May for allegedly stealing the pictures. Both have pleaded not guilty.
With the museum, Roanoke will again benefit from the old passenger station that was once a hub for commuters through western Virginia, Bradshaw said.
“We expect 50,000 people to come here each year. They’ll probably spend $10 each in the museum, and we expect them to match that in restaurant fees elsewhere,” Bradshaw said. “We’re just elated.”