In the postwar years, the market for serious railroad photography basically came down to Trains magazine. Publisher Al Kalmbach was himself a skilled photographer, and in the very first issue had pledged his magazine would have “the unending curiosity of National Geographic.” In 1947, the magazine’s format was enlarged, providing an even bigger showcase for emerging talents. The images were credited to scores of new names, especially the work of three young lions: Philip R. Hastings, Richard Steinheimer, and Jim Shaughnessy.
Abbey was surely paying attention to all this, having moved beyond Railroad Magazine to embrace Trains. Although he never explicitly credited other photographers with influencing him, his work began to exhibit a deepening insight and maturity. Getting into Trains became a goal, and he earned his first credit line in the June 1949 issue, a two-page photo story headlined “Diesel Display on the C&NW,” showing action photos of various passenger diesels rolling through his hometown of Evanston.
Abbey’s photography exploded onto the scene when he joined the Trains staff in 1950 and his advantages as a double threat came to the fore. Not only could he write and report a compelling article, he could illustrate it himself, using the new 120-format f/3.5 Automatic Rolleiflex he acquired via Kalmbach payroll deductions. He had already mastered the basics of photography in college and in Chanute, where the demands of daily newspapering forced him to think on his feet.
Morgan sanctified Abbey’s growing reputation in the November 1955 issue, in which the editor set aside an unprecedented fifteen pages for a single favorite photograph from an all-star lineup. The rest of the group included most of the luminaries shaking up readers each month: Hastings, Shaughnessy, and Steinheimer, of course, but also William D. Middleton, James A. LaVake, J. Parker Lamb, Robert Hale, Henry R. Griffiths, H. Reid, Don Sims, and Morgan’s art director, Bill Akin.
The introduction to the article was a sort of mission statement for Trains’ approach to photography. “The circulation and longevity of the magazine have been due in no mean measure to the photographers who’ve hauled their gear to trackside, there to record the ever-changing mode of the flanged wheel,” Morgan wrote. “In a demanding yet specialized field of illustration the standards have been high and the material rewards necessarily meager.”
Abbey’s contribution was telling. It was the only one in which a train wasn’t the central subject. Framed by the vine-covered stucco arch of the Santa Fe depot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a woman with a suitcase strolls past the gleaming flank of a coach on the El Capitan. It’s a timeless image of railroading as the average person experienced it. Commenting on the picture, Abbey wrote: “[This] contains something no railroad can be without—and I maintain few railroad photos should be without—the well-known human element.”
A full generation after that big appearance in Trains, Abbey’s work remained influential to yet another new wave of photographers. One of them was Blair Kooistra, a daring shooter who, like Abbey, melded a professional journalism background with an artist’s sensibility. Kooistra began to make his own big splash in Trains in the late 1970s. “Wally was a modern thinker when it came to railroads, evident in his published work,” says Kooistra. “This wasn’t stodgy of-the-era words and pictures, but progressive, cutting-edge stuff that followed the trends of the big picture magazines like LIFE,” said Kooistra in a 2017 interview.
Having just alighted from Santa Fe’s El Capitan passenger train, a young woman walks past one of the graceful arches of the station at Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 4, 1953. The station complex included a lunchroom, shops, a museum, and the Alvarado Hotel—among the grandest of the many grand hotels that the Fred Harvey Company operated along the Santa Fe. While some have been preserved, the Alvarado was demolished in 1970. Late in life, when Abbey assembled an album of his twenty-five favorite railroad photographs, he selected this one for its cover.
PROUD TO BE A RAILROADER
Abbey was an innovative railroad photographer, but he also had an advantage over most of his brethren: among those anointed by Morgan in that 1955 picture salon, Abbey was the lone professional railroader. He knew the business from the inside, courtesy of an astonishingly wide-ranging career.
Abbey’s apprenticeship in railroading began in college with a succession of three summer jobs, all in Chicago. In the summer of 1944, he worked as a diesel locomotive repairman’s helper at the Santa Fe shop on 21st Street, learning the intricacies of 16-cylinder prime movers and traction motors. The following year he landed a position as a filing clerk in the freight claim department of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy’s general offices at 547 West Jackson, a job he found boring but instructive.
Then came two pivotal summers—1947 and 1948—when he worked as a leverman, or operator, for the Chicago & North Western, working in various towers at important junctions around the northwest side of the city. The key requirement was simple: learn the ins and outs of train operations. It was a difficult challenge, given the dizzying complexities of signal indications and train orders, but it was an aspect of railroading Abbey came to love.
When his stint at Trains ended in late 1953, Abbey returned to the industry, first as the assistant to the director of public relations for the Association of Western Railways based in Chicago. For two years, Abbey tackled such issues as labor relations and state and federal regulation. He followed up that job with three years as western editor of Railway Age, the industry’s dominant trade magazine.
Abbey’s work at Railway Age led to his next job, and one he treasured. He had covered a complicated grain rate case involving the Soo Line, an upper Midwestern railroad, and one of the company’s vice presidents was so impressed he recruited Abbey to become the railroad’s director of public relations, a position Abbey held from 1959 to 1970.
At the Soo, Abbey was able to flex all the professional muscles he had acquired so far, improving the company’s relationship with the local and national press, upgrading its publications, representing management in countless public meetings and legislative hearings, even taking the lead role in creating the company’s bold new paint scheme of 1962. As a photographer, now working in the 35mm format, he also had the resources and access to create a comprehensive visual record of the era, much of it revealed in The Little Jewel, a rollicking memoir of his Soo Line years, published in 1984.
In 1970, Abbey launched his own public relations shop in Minneapolis and for a time was quite busy with work for Soo Line; Burlington Northern; and Detroit, Toledo & Ironton; along with such nonrailroad clients as Dayton-Hudson and 3M. He consulted for railroads on the repeal of antiquated “full crew” laws in Wisconsin and Arkansas, and helped make the public case for Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority. But after five years, the rigors of running a one-man show were wearing on him.
Abbey’s next job could scarcely have been more challenging. In 1975, the fabled Milwaukee Road was careening toward financial insolvency, a fate it shared with a number of American railroads, aggravated by its own problematic history. Abbey jumped right into the war zone, first as the Milwaukee’s director of corporate communications reporting to the president and, after 1977, as right-hand man to a succession of two bankruptcy trustees.
When Abbey first arrived back in Chicago at the Milwaukee Road offices, he confronted a challenge similar to the one he had encountered sixteen years before at the Soo. “They handed me an old, unprofessional operation the roots of which were deep in passenger-train advertising, even though the passenger trains were long gone,” he recalled. He did his best to professionalize the office, but soon the company’s financial problems overwhelmed everything, crowding Abbey’s schedule with trips to House and Senate offices and long hours writing testimony for congressional hearings.
Abbey kept his camera close, notably for a bittersweet inspection trip to the Milwaukee Road’s fabled but doomed Pacific Extension. Throughout the chaos, he stayed true to his favorite tenet of good public relations: “If our concern is the reputation of the Milwa
ukee Road, that reputation is created not in the public relations department but as the sum total of every encounter between and among thinking persons that in any way involves our company.”
Abbey left the shuddering Milwaukee Road in 1980, battle-scarred but eager to continue his career. Up next was Chicago-based Trailer Train Company, a leading firm in the intermodal logistics business, known for the use of “piggyback” truck trailers carried on trains. Abbey was the first communications professional in the company’s twenty-five-year history. He followed that up in 1982 with a move west to Pueblo, Colorado, site of the Association of American Railroads’ Transportation Technology Center, a vast proving ground inherited from the US Department of Transportation. Abbey reveled in this last chapter of his regular career, which included trying new approaches to photographing technology.
After the test center, Abbey embarked on a rewarding retirement. He and Martha remained in Pueblo, and Abbey returned to writing, authoring numerous articles for magazines and historical organizations. He became a regular on the railroad speakers’ circuit, delivering speeches and photo presentations with the same brand of wit and candor that distinguished his industry career.
Wallace W. Abbey III died at age eighty-six on January 3, 2014, in Minneapolis, where he had lived with his beloved wife Martha for several years, near their youngest daughter, Mary (Maggie) Abbey. His wife, Martha Abbey, had died on October 10, 2010, at age eighty-four. Together they are interred in the Abbey family plot in lovely Steele Cemetery, on the Nebraska prairie just west of Falls City.
“Ansel Adams I’m not,” Abbey once said, a bit too dismissively. Regardless, Abbey came to recognize the lasting value of his archive. He certainly knew that in countless moments he had been in the right place at the right time, making photographs no one else could make, summoning in a fraction of a second all that experience as a railroader and a storyteller.
In one of Abbey’s earliest railroad photographs, Frisco Lines freight trains meet at Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1940. Located in the southeastern corner of the state, Cherryvale, with a population just above 3,000 at the time, loomed large in Abbey’s early photography. His maternal grandparents lived there, and Abbey visited often with his family. Two Frisco routes met and crossed the Santa Fe at the north end of town, a place where Abbey spent many carefree hours of his youth, camera in hand.
Santa Fe train no. 12, the eastbound Chicagoan, arriving at Kansas City Union Station in 1940 as a worker on a tractor pulls two carts of mail onto the platform. Leading the train are unique “boxcab” diesel-electric locomotives nos. 1 and 1A, built by the Electro-Motive Corporation in 1935. Already showing a strong sense for composition, thirteen-year-old Abbey made the photograph from the observation car of train no. 212, the Tulsan, which he and his family would have caught that morning in Cherryvale, Kansas. The family was likely continuing to Chicago aboard no. 12.
Union Pacific 4-12-2 steam locomotive no. 9046 leading an eastbound freight train near Lawrence, Kansas, in 1946. UP was the only railroad in the world to use the 4-12-2 wheel arrangement—it owned a total of eighty-eight, built by the American Locomotive Company between 1926 and 1930. Weighing in at 355 tons each, they were among the most successful 3-cylinder locomotives of all time. While attending journalism school at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Abbey frequently went out photographing in the surrounding area.
Santa Fe M.154, a gas-electric “doodlebug” at the depot in Cherryvale, Kansas, on November 9, 1946. It ran on the railroad’s branch line to Coffeyville and also west to Winfield. Developed in the early twentieth century, motorized railcars like this one gave railroads a more economical way of providing passenger service on lightly traveled routes. The Santa Fe used them extensively on its branch lines in the Great Plains and the Southwest.
As a child, Abbey frequently visited his maternal grandparents in Cherryvale, Kansas, and the Frisco depot there became one of his favorite train-watching haunts. The depot sat at the southwest corner of a crossing with the Santa Fe. Abbey recorded this view in 1950, which looks east and takes in a riot of since-vanished details of the railroad landscape, from train order semaphore signals to the water tower, telegraph poles, and smash boards protecting the crossing.
Four Chesapeake & Ohio GP9s lead a westbound empty hopper train downgrade through the Allegheny Mountains at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on March 9, 1957. Abbey was attending an industry conference at the Greenbrier, a luxurious resort hotel built by the C&O in 1913. He made time to photograph several trains, but this view, looking almost directly into the late winter sun, is emblematic of the railroad and the region.
Amtrak’s Empire Builder heads west along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis on a summer evening in the late 1970s. The arch spans of the Third Avenue and Hennepin bridges stand behind the locomotives; barely visible beyond them is the Great Northern’s Nicollet Island Bridge. Amtrak took over most of the nation’s remaining intercity passenger trains in 1971. Its first new locomotives were 150 SDP40Fs built by Electro-Motive in 1973 and 1974; two of them lead a venerable E-unit on this train.
The summer of 1957 was the last great showing of steam power on Union Pacific’s Sherman Hill in Wyoming. A traffic surge brought several recently stored steam locomotives back into service on the railroad’s main line. Abbey was one of many railroad photographers to make the pilgrimage to Wyoming that summer. On August 17, he recorded this evocative view of two UP behemoths—4-8-4 no. 829 and Big Boy no. 4019—powering a westbound freight out of Hermosa Tunnel (out of view to left).
Around 1980, Abbey revisited the Hermosa Tunnel on Union Pacific’s Sherman Hill in Wyoming. He had been there once before, in 1957, to photograph the end of steam operations on this crucial main line. The setting remains largely the same, and the railroad is still busy. Four 3,000-horsepower SD40-2s have replaced the 4-8-4 and Big Boy from Abbey’s previous view, while solid trains of truck trailers now vie for space with traditional manifest freights.
A lone figure ponders the weed-grown Chicago & North Western line past the dilapidated depot in Iroquois, South Dakota, around 1980. From its zenith as the nation’s backbone during World War II, much of the railroad industry had fallen far and fast over the ensuing three and a half decades. Abbey had seen and photographed much of it. You would never know it from this scene, but a railroad renaissance was beginning. Abbey would see it take shape, although he would largely leave its visual documentation to a new generation of photographers.
Two Burlington Northern switchers shuffle freight cars at Westminster in St. Paul, Minnesota, as two trains pass on the tracks at right. The Burlington Northern merger of 1970 combined the Great Northern; Northern Pacific; Burlington Route; and Spokane, Portland & Seattle into a massive system that sprawled across the northern half of the country from Chicago to the Pacific. The consolidating power of successful mergers was one of many factors fueling the railroad renaissance that was taking shape by the end of Abbey’s career.
Soo and Great Northern freight trains meet at the Minneapolis suburb of Crystal, Minnesota, on April 10, 1961. Abbey was at Crystal Tower to document the Soo Line’s installation of new centralized traffic control equipment. While this type of photograph would not necessarily have been part of his assignment, he knew an opportunity when he saw one, using wheels and couplers of the passing Soo train to frame the waiting GN F-unit in the distance.
Grover O’Dell copies train orders by hand at East Portland Tower in Portland, Oregon, in October of 1970. The tower lacked a typewriter and was rarely used for orders until Union Pacific eliminated its telegrapher job at Portland Union Station at the beginning of the year. O’Dell was the regular night shift operator and is likely taking down orders for train no. 18, the eastbound Portland Rose, which departed just before the end of his shift.
As a college student in the late 1940s, Abbey spent two summers working as an operator for the Chicago & North Western at several towers in and around Chicago. From these jobs he learned the operation
s side of railroading from the ground level, and the familiarity he gained with the work as well as these interior spaces informed his photography throughout the rest of his life. Courtesy of the Abbey family.
The conductor of a Union Pacific piggyback train watches, radio in hand to report any problems, as a coal train sails by on an adjacent track. A “manifest” freight train stands on the track at far left, representing the traditional model of freight railroading. The two trains at right represent recent innovation and some of the biggest sources for rail traffic growth in the late twentieth century.
Self-portrait from 1950, the year Abbey joined the staff of Trains magazine, with his new Rolleiflex. Abbey used the 120-format camera—which took square negatives with a fixed, 80mm, f3.5 lens—for the majority of his photography from 1950 into the early 1960s, when he shifted to a smaller 35mm Pentax system with interchangeable lenses. Courtesy of the Abbey family.
Abbey poses with the hi-rail-equipped Chevy Suburban used to make his 1979 inspection trip of the Milwaukee Road’s Pacific extension with bankruptcy trustee Richard Ogilvie. Courtesy of the Abbey family.
Wallace W. Abbey: A Life in Railroad Photography Page 2
