Welcome to Adventures in Chasing Steam

Canadian Pacific Railroad PI-N 2-8-2 engine 5214 (rebuilt from a 2-8-0 by Angus CPR shops). Bayview Junction, Ontario Canada, January 28, 1959

People often ask me how I got interested in trains. I find this hard to answer because I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in trains. No one in my family ever worked for a railroad but when I first became aware of my surroundings we lived just half a block from the 4- track mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad.  I would frequently walk down to the corner of our street and Lancaster Avenue which paralleled the railroad to Lancaster, PA and beyond.

Trains were a very important part of life on the Mainline then. My grandfather, a Philadelphia lawyer who wrote adventure stories for children in his spare time lived a block from the Haverford station and rode the Paoli local to work. Every morning he ate his breakfast with his pocket watch in front of him. At the appropriate minute he got up, kissed my grandmother goodbye, and walked briskly to the station, climbing the last steps to the platform just as his train was coming to a stop. Sometimes I went to the station to meet him when he stepped down from his regular seat in the last car.  My father, who taught school at the Espicopal Academy in Overbook, sometimes took the train, too, but more often rode his bicycle.

Traffic on the mainline was intense—aside from the frequent owl faced electric Paoli Locals (with round portholes for the motorman), streamlined GG-1 electric locomotives rushed by our corner with express trains and limiteds to legendary places I could only imagine—Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit and many more.  I knew those trains went around the famous Horseshhoe Curve, sometimes featured on the PRR calendars my grandfather gave me (he knew the President of the railroad, who lived on the next block which to me was like knowing a movie star.)  Freights lumbered westward on a slight grade with two electric engines straining at the head end and at least one Mikado steam engine pushing the caboose.  Troop trains rushed past pulled by steam K-4 Pacifics.  It was a small boy’s paradise and I often wandered up to the corner on Lancaster Avenue where I could watch the show.  Once a policeman confronted me, saying I was too young to be alone, away from my parents, and he walked me back to my house. But I was back at the same corner the next day, and the day after that and the day after that. He wasn’t, so that worked out well for everyone.

Several times I rode the Paoli local to Overbrook to visit my father at school.  Once I walked the half-mile to Haverford to buy my ticket, only to be turned away by the elderly ticket agent, who said I was too small to ride the train alone. (Actually I think I was too short to be visible over the ticket window counter.) I cried all the way home. My mother was furious and marched me right back to the station and made the agent sell me a ticket! I boarded the train. I knew the stations by heart and called them out to everyone in the car before the conductor, a woman, one of the many filling in for men away at war, could do so. She seemed delighted and encouraged me to keep helping her.

We moved to Rutland, Vermont when I was ten, and that’s when I fell in love with steam—the only kind of train the Rutland railroad had. Steam engines sighed. They hissed. They shouted when they started up; their bells tolled, their whistles hooted and screeched. To me they seemed alive. I visited the roundhouse regularly with an ANSCO 120 box camera my mother had given me, and began taking photos of them. Over time I became enough of a fixture that I was allowed to ride around on the turntable and climb into the cabs of cold engines. Sometimes I worked brake valves, knowing the engines were chocked with chains.  Once a worker caught me doing that and very respectfully asked me not to:  “You know one of us might be working with the brakeshoes on the other side of the engine where you couldn’t see us,” he said.  “If you applied the brakes, our fingers could be crushed.”  This thought was so horrifying that I never did it again. 

I continued to ride trains and photograph steam engines every chance I got up through high school and in college, where my roommate, Andy Wittenborn, (also a railfan as luck—or fate—would have it) got me my first good camera. It was a Rolleiflex, with a lens for sharp pictures. At the end of my senior year I signed up with an international volunteer work program run by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker service organization that was similar in some respects to today’s Peace Corps, but not run by the government.  I wanted to go to Africa or India, but the AFSC was recruiting only for Mexico, so that’s where I went. I spent two years doing community service near Toluca, drilling wells in small villages in need of clean drinking water. When my time was up, I went back to Mexico City to head the offices of the Save the Children foundation.

This was one of the highlights of time as a rail photographer and journalist. By then I’d had several of my photos and stories published in Trains magazine, and I had gotten accustomed to traveling with my camera and a rucksack, hitching rides, sometimes hopping trains, riding buses, doing whatever I could to chase and photograph steam engines. But the years in Mexico were among my happiest. I met Barbara Imm, (also in the AFSC) who I fell in love with and was married to for 59 years. I learned Spanish. I got to know a beautiful country, its joyful music and welcoming people. While I have photographed trains in 20 countries, nowhere (with the possible exception of Cuba) was I invited into engine cabs as frequently I was in Mexico. This not only made for exciting adventures, but for historical pictures and stories that have stayed with me for years. In 2013 I started putting the photos and pictures together in a book called Mexican Memories, (working title).

Eventually Barbara and I moved to back to the US where we got jobs and had a family. Still, for the next forty years, whenever I could, I continued to travel all over the world to capture working steam before it died out.

My articles and photos have appeared in publications such as Trains, Classic Trains, The Washington Post Magazine, Railroad Heritage, and 100 Greatest Railroad Photos. Some of my photos in museum exhibits, and I was a recipient of the a recipient of The Center for Railroad Photography’s Fred A. and Jane R. Stindt Photography award in 2010. Two years ago I published a collection of photos in a book called The Last Winter. Now, I am finishing, Mexican Memories, which is due to be published in 2025.

This substack, a collaborative effort between my daughter Rebecca and me, was created as a way to start sharing some of what’s in the book, as well as photos and stories that might never be in a book.

(Rebecca has been helping me edit both my books, and working with me to curate the stories and photos you see here. Sometimes you may see a guest post or a comment or two from her.)

We will be posting a story and a photo approximately every two weeks.

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*If you become a paid yearly subscriber, awesome! You will help us keep the substack going AND receive a free copy of Mexican Memories when it comes out in 2025.

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If you are a railfan, steam engine connoisseur, or lover of rail photography, I hope you enjoy this publication. I look forward from hearing some of your stories as well.

If you are not a railfan, but like black and white photos, history, or want to read about someone who did adventure travel before the phrase existed, I hope you’ll find something you like here, too.

All Aboard? Let’s go!