Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72646 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-20
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

Synopsis
From 1955 to 1959, O. Winston Link travelled up and down the Norfolk and Western railroad, taking pictures of the trains, the towns and the people who lived and worked there. This book contains day and night photographs, with a text on the railroad's activities, Link's achievement and his life.

Customer Reviews

Breathtaking and elegiac
O Winston Link trained as a civil engineer but followed a career as an industrial photographer. Whenever he had a spare moment, he would photgraph trains. In 1955, with the end of steam looming, he took his first night photograph of a locomotive on the Norfolk and Western Railroad. He had to act before his favourite subjects became extinct. Cutting back on his day job, he spent as much of the next five years as he could, as an adopted member of the Norfolk & Western family, wandering their sytem and photographing locomotives at night. His new photographic genre required mountains of equipment and superlative technique, but the results are breathtaking. These pictures of machines, of people, and the relationship between them, are sophisticated, full of wit and visually stunning, but they are more. With their unique captions, at the same time poetic and familiar, they are a lesson on how might learn to appreciate the lives of others.

Great book!
In 1955, photographer Winston Link took note of the disappearance of the steam locomotive from the American scene, and he decided to take quality photos of the last steam railroad left, the Norfolk and Western Railway. Over a period of several years, he took a series of excellent pictures of steam trains in motion. In the beginning, Mr. Link's idea was to take black-and-white photos of locomotives at night, but later he expanded this to trains operating during the day, and he even took some color photos.

This is an excellent book, if you like steam locomotives. In particular the color photos are breathtaking. My favorites were those of the streamlined J class. Great book!

Probably the best photos ever
Link travelled along the N&W during the late 1950is and took some extremely good night black and white shots of steam locomotives. This book also contains some color day photography from the Abingdon Branch. A must have indeed.