I started photographing from the perch at Denver’s Union Station in March of 2015, when Amtrak announced they were going to run a Winter Park ski train to see if there was still interest after the Rio Grande stopped running the ski train a few years earlier.
This old shot, taken on September 11, 1968 at Andover, Virginia, is a real classic in terms of “content.” This is Mr. Ed Renfro. He was the swing-shift Interstate Railroad dispatcher (meaning he covered the off days for the regular first, second and third trick dispatchers so his sleep cycle was always screwed up!) Ed lived in Norton, and also filled the job as first trick car distributor at times. I was doing my janitorial chores at Andover that particular evening and thought he would make a great photo subject. Indeed he did!
This past May I took a week-long business trip in the UK, starting in Aberdeen, Scotland on Monday morning and ending at London Heathrow at the end of the day on Friday. Normally this type of travel is grueling and exhausting, and I would have groaned, except our business partner insisted I travel each evening to the next city by train. By train!! My frown turned to a grin.
When I was working on the video “Hopper and the Railroad,” I ordered Hopper’s Places, by Gail Levin. The book did not come until earlier this week, too late to reference for the video but it is worth a mention if you are interested in Hopper’s work.
Last fall I shared some ideas with my friend Rick Selva about what I thought was needed at the SONO Switch Tower Museum in South Norwalk, Connecticut. (From this point on I will refer to it as Old Tower 44 like it was called on the New Haven RR. Later on it was called Berk then after it closed and controlled from NYC at the control center, CP 240 & 241.) Rick’s background when he hired out on Conrail was as lineman on the B&A and Maybrook line. His hobby is old communication equipment, and he knows it very well. Rick and I threw around some ideas and I ran them by John Garofalo, who is one of the most dedicated volunteers you could ever meet at the tower. He and his friend Bob Gambling are there almost every weekend from May till October, when we close. Garf, as he likes to be called, was very excited about our ideas and gave us the OK to do it. Rick’s excitement when I told him we could do our project of hooking up the scissor phone and other phones you see in the pictures throughout our three floors was just what I wanted to see and hear. So Rick, Bob Eb and I spent eight hours working to run wires while Rick hooked these antique phones up. His attention to detail was really something to see, even running wire across the back wall to hide a modern-day wire and he used the insulators you see and affixed the wire to it like it was done 100 years ago.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad station in Madeira, Ohio, was a great place to be in 1967. It had five active telegraph wires. One was for Division use among operators and the dispatcher in Chillicothe, Ohio. A few operators and the DS were old ‘lightning slingers’ so the wire did get some use. Two more were long distance company lines.