David Plowden's Talk about his Railroad Photography, with selected photos from his other interests:  Grain Elevators and Bridges.

Up in time for breakfast at the Vagabond Inn of boiled eggs and fresh waffles and juice, I had plenty of time to get myself organized to be across the street (through the parking garage) at the California State Railroad Museum for David's scheduled 11 a.m. talk.

The show was to be in the East Theatre, and I had about twenty minutes to take a quick look into the musuem and snap a few photos of my favorite cab-forward 4294.  I spotted David getting ready for his talk and asking for a chair to use while he made his presentation.  

David was born in 1932, and when he moved slowly from his audience seat to the podium after his introduction, he said, "I'm about ready for the scrap yard."

His black and white slides, taken with his Hasselblad,  were projected to about 20 feet by 20 feet in the theatre.  He talked about each slide with authority.  He described taking the photos, mostly in the upper regions of the USA and Canada, during the winter when the steam looks the best.

I do not have any shots of his theatre presentation, but I do have a link on the Links page that is a slide show with the same photos he presented in the show.

David began by showing the first photo he'd ever taken, at age 11, in 1943, taken with a Brownie Box Camera, of a steam engine approaching a station.

He said he had wanted to be a railroader, and accomplished that but quit when they promoted him to a desk job away from a job where he could ride daily in a steam locomotive.

He was an assistant to Minor White and Edward Weston.  Both used the zone system.  He photographed the Rutland  with Bill Cannon, Conductor, to Bellows Falls.  For years he got cab rides on these 54 miles.

1951 he went to Yale and studied Economics, because he wanted to become a railroader.  In 1955 he got a job in Montana where steam was still running with 0-8 Makados.  He had the run of the railroad and knew all the engineers and employees.  He told them where he was shooting that day and asked the engineers to sand the flues for good photos.  His boss asked him to photograph out of town because the smoke and soot was ruining too many lady's laundry in town.  When promoted to a desk job, he started working in travel.

He met O. Winston Link and became his assistant in 1958.  Link worked for the NY Central as a bridge photographer.  1959 David went to Minor White, got to be an assistant, and got the run of Canadian Pacific to shoot anything anywhere because his boss knew steam was going out.

All his shots are in winter with steam swirling all around the locomotives.  He said his favorite place was in the roundhouse with the locomotives steamed up.  He said you could really commune with them there, like giant gentle beasts.

He liked steam locomotivHe had some photos of es because "you can see how it works" from outside.  Not like the couling added later and on diesels.  That's like cows behind a fence.  "You can see a diesel locomotive or an airplane, but you don't know how it works!"

He had some photos of railroad bridges.  Railroads have abandoned the rights-of-way but left the bridges.  He said some photos were of viaducts and others were of bridges.  Later I asked him the difference and he said a viaduct crosses a ravine or valley or non-navigable water, where a bridge crosses navagable water.  Some bridges he showed were truss bridges.

He had a photo of the Superior, WI, ore docks, where I have been, and he mentioned that it is a mile long, one of the largest manmade structures in the world, and can be see from an airplane at 36,000 feet.

With many of his photos he used the term, "Whistle Off", to mean the train starting up from the station.

He also used "Train Time" in a small town for the time for the train to arrive.  He said "Train Time" is when the world stops at your town's station.

He called himself an "Iternate Photographer."  He also referred to "Steam Town" in Scranton, PA.

David talked and showed slides for 1 1/2 hours, and every minute was intriguing.  Afterwards, I walked through the museum again, to view his exhibition and trying for more photos.  From the Jacket of his book:

FROM THE JACKET: As a child, David Plowden was given an inexpensive box camera and before long he began to photograph railroad trains. As he matured and started on what would become a lifetime in photography, trains — specifically steam locomotives — continued to be one of his passions. But by the beginning of the 1960s they were eclipsed by diesel engines; the steam era had ended.

It is our good fortune that Plowden was passionate about trains. For years he photographed not only the locomotives but all facets of the railroad world, from long steam-powered freight trains crisscrossing middle America to the yards, small stations, and industrial settings that are synonymous with trains. While his photographic love affair with America, and in particular the mid-West where he lives, resulted in many books and exhibitions of his beautiful docu- mentary photographs, he never lost sight of the railroads, where his work would result in the images presented in this book, a reverent tribute and requiem for the era of steam.

David Plowden is the author of more than twenty photography books, including Vanishing Point: Fifty Years of Photography, published by Norton. As a young man out of college he worked on the Great Northern Railroad in Minnesota, and when the opportunity presented itself, he photographed trains. Later, as he became increasingly well known in the world of photography, he continued to document the railroad world but it was not the same. The exhilaration of a steam locomotive thundering down the track was gone. It lives on in this book.

I don't remember seeing Northwestern Pacific 4-6-0 No. 112 here at the museum before, so I did quite a photo study of it.  It's a good thing that I did because the No. 112 and the No. 613 were pulled out of the roundhouse for the reception.