Choo-Choos in the Night

Ghost Town. Virginia, 1957 © Conway Link; courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum

In the 1950s, a photographer named O. Winston Link set about memorializing the last of a dying breed ~ the steam engine. While they were gone from the rest of the country, replaced by the diesel engine, the car, and the airplane, they were still being used along the Norfolk and Western Railway. The photographs he took are stark black-and-whites that capture the exoticism, the romantic energy of these formidable machines but also chronicle that time in between, when, for a moment, the old coexists with that which is taking its place, for better or worse: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/a-gorgeous-photographic-elegy-to-the-last-great-steam-train/263220/