O. Winston Link was a Brooklyn photographer who turned his love of trains into an art form. As most Class I railroads were converting their fleets to diesel, the Norfolk & Western, based in Roanoke, Virginia, continued to run steam engines. Unlike most railroads, the N&W designed, built and maintained their own engines in the Roanoke shops.
Link began photographing N&W trains just a few months before the railroad announced their first move toward diesel. His photographs were highly staged and mostly taken at night and as such, required massive amounts of time to set up. He preferred working at night because he could light was he wanted to see and not light what he didn’t want to see. In that respect he perfected a very different method of photographic composition.
Link’s work wasn’t just a catalog of steam engines but also a documentation of all aspects of the people who lived, worked and played along the N&W railroad. The museum is in the N&W passenger station adjacent to the Roanoke shops.
Across the tracks and just a few blocks away is the Virginia Museum of Transportation, housed in the N&W Roanoke freight station. While it includes all types of transportation exhibits from horse-drawn hearses to Panama Canal mules, we were there, of course, to see the trains.
