I received the book The Last Steam Railroad in America - Photos by O. Winston Link with text by Thomas H Garver - as a Christmas gift this year. I’ve only managed to get to page 23, but can highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Steam Trains and/or Railroad Photography. I had heard of O. Winston Link, seen a few of his pictures and have some of his sound recordings. I knew nothing of the man or the story behind his railroad photography. The story is fascinating and the work is astounding. O. Winston Link was a commercial photographer who had been exposed to trains as a boy, but did not consider himself a railfan. He was an old-school photographer preferring posed pictures using a large format camera at a time when the industry was adopting 35mm candid photos. He once dreamed of setting up synchronized flash to take night photographs of trains. Many years later he had an opportunity to test the technique. The resulting photo gave him a vision that would guide his life for the next several years. He would document the Norfolk & Western’s last years of steam using night flash photography. The most interesting thing about Link is that he knew there would be no market or interest in his photographs in the time that he took them. He was smart enough to realize that the collective work would become highly regarded several decades later. He was fortunate to live long enough to enjoy some of the fame his photos finally brought. Today there is an O. Winston Link museum that showcases his work (http://www.linkmuseum.org). This book is but a small collection of the thousands of photographs that make up his collection. If you have never seen O. Winston Link’s work, buy this book. If you have seen it, but don’t own any examples, then I still highly recommend the book. JR
P.S. I linked that image from Amazon.Com, but buy the book locally and support your local merchants.