O. Winston Link and the Last Night of Steam
Near Roanoke, Virginia
On a winter night in January of nineteen fifty-five, a New York commercial photographer named O. Winston Link, in Virginia on an industrial job, photographed a Norfolk and Western steam train and ended up spending the better part of five years chasing steam. Link paid for the project himself, with encouragement from the railroad.
What he found instead was a civilization at its last hour, and he had the technical obsession and the artistic vision to record it with a precision that has never been equaled. Link's signature achievement was night photography. He set up elaborate banks of flashbulbs, sometimes hundreds of them, arranged across fields and station platforms and riverbanks, and fired them simultaneously to illuminate scenes that would otherwise be invisible in the dark.
A locomotive rolling through a drive-in movie theater in Iaeger, West Virginia, while teenagers in parked cars watch the screen. A steam engine crossing a trestle above a swimming hole where children are caught mid-splash. These images are technically virtuosic but they are also elegiac: Link knew the diesel was coming, knew that within a few years the Norfolk and Western would retire its steam fleet entirely, and he photographed with the focused urgency of a man writing a farewell letter.
The Norfolk and Western completed its conversion to diesel in nineteen sixty. Link had spent five years documenting what he called the last mainline steam railroad in America. His negatives and the prints made from them now constitute one of the great photographic archives of American industrial life.
The O. Winston Link Museum in downtown Roanoke, housed in the former Norfolk and Western passenger station on Shenandoah Avenue, holds the largest collection of his prints and equipment in the world. The station itself is part of the story: a Beaux-Arts building that once saw passengers board the Pocahontas and the Powhatan Arrow is now a museum dedicated to the man who watched that era end through a camera lens.
