Images Of Western Railroading

From dizzying mountain passes to verdant pine valleys and arid desert canyons, the regions spanning the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast have always presented the railroad industry with special difficulties, spurring the development of new equipment to surmount those challenges. This is an art book treatment showing North America's most recognizable railroads in spectacular locations appealing to railfans nationwide.

From dizzying mountain passes to verdant pine valleys and arid desert canyons, the regions spanning the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast have always presented the railroad industry with special difficulties, spurring the development of new equipment to surmount those challenges. This is an art book treatment showing North America's most recognizable railroads in spectacular locations appealing to railfans nationwide.

The Railroad Photography of Donald W. Furler showcases the black-and-white imagery of a master of the craft. Furler (1917-1994) grew up in New Jersey and helped pioneer the "action shot" to show trains at speed. He faithfully and dramatically documented the final decade of steam operations in the northeastern United States with technically-superior and often creative images portraying the trains in their environments. While his work appeared frequently in early issues of Trains magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, it has rarely been seen since. As someone who helped write the rules for railroad action photography, an examination of Furler's photography is long overdue.

Significant Images of Railroading presents an overview of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art's collections. Of the nearly 200,000 images in those collections, 93 are presented here in vibrant color and rich, quadtone black-and-white. Those images come from 10 principal collections, including the work of Wallace W. Abbey, whose circa 1950 photograph from Chicago Union Station is featured on the cover. A preservation award from Trains magazine helped fund processing of the Abbey Collection. Other major holdings include the works of Fred M. Springer, John F. Bjorklund, and Ted Rose. In addition to the Trains award, funding for this publication came from Fred and Dale Springer, the Candelaria Fund, and Bon and Holly French.

In the mid-1860s, as the Union Pacific Railroad headed westward from Nebraska, another company, the Central Pacific, pushed eastward from California. Their goal was to meet somewhere in between, forming a single railway line that would bridge the continent. That historic meeting took place in May 1869 in northern Utah, and photographer Andrew J. Russell was there to document the historic event. His work resulted in one of the most important photos of the 19th century and probably the most famous railroad image of all time. The photo, often called ñEast and West,î was viewed by a worldwide audience and affirmed that railroads were at the cutting edge of transportation technology. The continent was now linked.

Ted Benson is widely acknowledged as one of the world's top railway photographers. In One Track Mind he presents more than 200 of his finest black-and-white photographs on the topic of western railroading.

The construction of the transcontinental railroad (1865–1869) marked a milestone in United States history, symbolizing both the joining of the country’s two coasts and the taming of its frontier wilderness by modern technology. But it was through the power of images—and especially the photograph—that the railroad attained its iconic status. Iron Muse provides a unique look at the production, distribution, and publication of images of the transcontinental railroad: from their use as an official record by the railroad corporations, to their reproduction in the illustrated press and travel guides, and finally to their adaptation to direct sales and albums in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tracing the complex relationships and occasional conflicts between photographer, publisher, and curator as they crafted the photographs’ different meanings over time, Willumson provides a comprehensive portrayal of the creation and evolution of an important slice of American visual culture.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press This book includes 368 pages of maps, photographs and technical data on the history of railroading in California. There are detailed reports on dates of operation, mergers, miles of track, maximum grade, gauge and rail weight. It also includes the histories of thousands of locomotives.

In the late 1980s, David Kahler was deeply inspired by seeing an exhibition of O. Winston Link photographs. He soon began making annual trips to the West Virginia and eastern Kentucky coalfields, destinations that strongly resonated with his own aesthetic of "place." Armed with a used Leica M6 and gritty Tri-X film, he and his wife made six week-long trips in the dead of winter to photograph trains along the Pocahontas Division of the Norfolk Southern Railway. Nearly one hundred images edited from this body of work form the core of The Railroad and the Art of Place, along with a selection of earlier Pennsylvania Railroad steam-era photographs that reflect Kahler's interest in the railroad landscape from an early age. Also included are three essays by Kahler, Scott Lothes, and Jeff Brouws, discussing the personal motivations, historical context, and aesthetic development behind the photography. With funding for printing provided by the Kahler Family Charitable Fund, all sales will go to support the Center's work.

“Some of the most accomplished scholars of railroad history…tell the story of these enterprises which totally re-shaped the western landscape.”—The Michigan Railfan After Promontory profiles the history and heritage behind the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. Starting with the original Union Pacific—Central Pacific lines that met at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, the book expands the narrative by considering all of the transcontinental routes in the United States and examining their impact on building this great nation. Exquisitely illustrated with full color photographs, After Promontory divides the western United States into three regions—central, southern, and northern—and offers a deep look at the transcontinental routes of each one. Included are contributions by such renowned railroad historians as Maury Klein, Keith Bryant, Don Hofsommer, H. Roger Grant, and Rob Krebs. Includes photos