O. Winston Link and the Last Steam Railroad

Somewhere near this spot in the Shenandoah Valley, photographer O. Winston Link set up one of his most celebrated shots in the mid nineteen fifties. Link spent years documenting the Norfolk and Western Railway, the last major American railroad still running on steam power.

He worked at night, hauling enormous flashgun rigs to illuminate trains against darkened rural scenes, and the results looked like movie stills. One famous image captured swimmers in a creek below, unbothered, while a locomotive thundered past overhead on a bridge. Link saw that steam was dying and treated it like a civilization worth preserving.

He finished his project just as the Norfolk and Western converted to diesel in nineteen sixty. His photographs became icons of an era that vanished almost the moment he put his camera down.