Wallace W. Abbey

by Kevin P. Keefe

  To climb out of California’s San Joaquin Valley, Santa Fe utilized Southern Pacific’s line over Tehachapi Pass. Abbey visited this hallowed piece of mountain railroading only once, in the spring of 1970, when he captured this muscular view of Santa Fe at the dawn of the decade. Five big hood units charge away from the camera, with the railroad’s logo in the foreground, stretching from the floor to the ceiling of a “Shock Control” boxcar, while cumulus clouds build over the arid mountains.

  Trains coworker and future editor in chief David P. Morgan watches from the second-story doorway of the signal tower at Holliday, Kansas, as a train approaches in 1953. Locomotive no. 2925, its stack fully extended, leads a long mixed freight, heavy with refrigerator cars. The engine was one of thirty built by Baldwin in 1944, which were the heaviest and among the largest 4-8-4s of all time. Sister no. 2926 is currently being restored in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  Chicago–Los Angeles trains meet at Joliet, Illinois, on October 14, 1951. Rock Island eastbound no. 4, the Golden State Limited, clears the crossing as Santa Fe westbound no. 23, the Grand Canyon, waits at Union Station. At-grade crossings of multiple railroads were among Abbey’s favorite photography subjects, and he strove to show more than one train whenever possible.

  TWO

  THE TRAINS MAGAZINE YEARS

  WALLY ABBEY ARRIVED AT AL KALMBACH’S SMALL BUT GROWING publishing company in the summer of 1950, reporting for work at the firm’s stolid old eight-story building on the northwest fringe of downtown Milwaukee. His timing couldn’t have been better, both for himself and for the magazine staff he was joining.

  By 1950, Trains was at a crossroads. Launched by Kalmbach ten years earlier out of sheer passion and contrary to good business advice, the magazine’s first few years nonetheless were a sensation. It tapped directly into a market of railroad enthusiasts hungry for something that treated its subject with intelligence and craft. In his first message to readers in November 1940, Al Kalmbach even named National Geographic as his standard. Trains would be a literate magazine, printed on slick paper and illustrated with the best photographs. In the immediate postwar years, its circulation surged.

  But by the end of its first decade, Trains’ fortunes stalled. The reason was obvious to anyone who came trackside to watch trains: the steam locomotive was disappearing. Always railroading’s central object of affection, steam had defined America’s romance with the industry for more than a century. By 1950 the barking, hissing, whistling engines of songs and novels and movies were giving way rapidly to mass-produced and decidedly unromantic diesels.

  Abbey loved steam, but mostly he loved railroading, in all its forms, and as a professional journalist he was determined to tell good stories, steam engines or no steam engines. It helped that he was coming to a staff loaded with comparable talent. Abbey’s name first appeared on the Trains masthead in the September 1950 issue, joining David P. Morgan and Rosemary Entringer among the small corps of associate editors working for then editor Willard V. Anderson.

  Pairing Abbey with Morgan was pure serendipity. Abbey had already proven himself to be a skilled reporter and photographer, his early freelance work informed by his experiences as a working railroader. In Morgan, he had a colleague that would go on to become a legend, someone blessed with incredible writing chops and a vision of the industry that thrilled readers. That both men found themselves working out of the same shop constituted a dream team long before anyone invented the term.

  The challenge for Abbey and Morgan was simple but daunting: make this brave new world of the modern railroad interesting to an audience raised on steam and coal smoke.

  Trains’ bosses quickly figured out Abbey’s role: get out on the road and cover the hell out of what’s going on. As a reporter and photographer, he was too good a double threat to keep in the office. His skills with the camera probably had as much to do with it as anything, given the magazine’s graphic aspirations. A bonus was Abbey’s talent for capturing railroaders at work. “It was understood that photography was part of the job,” Abbey told writer John Gruber in the Summer 2010 issue of Classic Trains magazine. “While not a direct assignment, there was lots of it, and it was better if we had pictures with people.”

  So with his camera always in hand, Abbey went on a dizzying variety of assignments. In that very first September 1950 issue, Abbey contributed a brief but highly readable report on how Union Pacific humped its freight cars at the giant yard in North Platte, Nebraska, illustrated with nine photos by Abbey. Abundantly evident was his gift for elegantly weaving together the salient fact, the telling detail, even in this little piece about such a common aspect of the industry.

  Then the plum assignments began rolling in: “Night Ride on the El Capitan,” in which Abbey rode one of Santa Fe’s most famous passenger trains; “Central States Dispatch,” an odyssey aboard a unique freight train across seven different eastern railroads; “Route of the Flying Saucers,” analyzing the Erie Railroad’s hottest freight trains; “The Press Previews the Congressional,” showcasing the Pennsylvania Railroad’s newest high-profile passenger train; and “Temple of Transportation,” an homage to illustrious Cincinnati Union Terminal. His article on the Terminal was especially memorable; legions of talented photographers flocked there in the early 1950s to record the Art Deco passenger-train mecca. But Abbey’s photographs were definitive.

  The capstone of Abbey’s Trains years came with the January 1954 issue, featuring his eighteen-page you-are-there analysis of his beloved Santa Fe, called “Super Railroad,” an article profusely illustrated with the author’s photographs. This unprecedented look at a single railroad showcased all of Abbey’s skills: his arresting, vivid photographs, of course, but also his engaging text, a detailed but absorbing exercise in long-form narrative that would stand up today as state-of-the-art magazine journalism.

  Abbey’s years at Trains were a happy chapter of his life. He and his wife, Martha, settled in Cedarburg, a charming little German-heritage town on the northern fringe of the Milwaukee suburbs. With the births of their two daughters, Mary and Martha, they began their family. Wally and his wife enjoyed the social whirl of those early Kalmbach years, making lifelong friends of a number of employees and their families. At work, Abbey embraced the relentless magazine deadlines and enjoyed the healthy competitive pressure that comes with talented colleagues. His career was off to a great start.

  But his tenure at Trains wouldn’t last long. In less than four years, Abbey was ready to move on, his last appearance on the masthead coming in the February 1954 issue. By then he had taken a job at the Association of Western Railways, an industry trade group. Perhaps he was motivated by a rivalry with Dave Morgan, who went on to be the beloved editor in chief of Trains for thirty-three years, although Abbey denied that in an interview decades later. In fact, he was quite fond of Morgan. More likely is that Abbey was responding to simple ambition, the kind that could not be rewarded fully at a small magazine for enthusiasts. Instead, he felt the pull of railroading itself.

  An Erie Railroad tug departs Manhattan with two car floats to take across the Hudson River to New Jersey in January of 1951. Waterborne traffic around New York Harbor was big business for the Erie. In his article about the railroad that ran in the May issue of Trains that year, Abbey reported, “The Erie owns 12 tugs, three lighters, 102 barges, 19 refrigerator barges, 14 gas-hoist and two steam-hoist lighters, 74 scows and 26 car floats.”

  In snow-covered western New York on a January day in 1951, freight trains pass on the Erie Railroad. A steam-powered eastbound bears down on westbound no. 99, the so-called Flying Saucer—hottest westbound freight train on a railroad full of hot freights. Named by employees, the Saucer forwarded cars from the big yards of Croxton, New Jersey, and Maybrook, New York, all the way across the railroad to western connections in Chicago. Its eastbound counterpart left the Windy City at 8:00 p.m. and arrived in Jersey City just two mornings later.

  A Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train led by one of
its iconic GG1 electric locomotives soars over the Erie’s Croxton Yard at Secaucus, New Jersey, in 1951. A crane on the Erie is in the process of unloading steel girders—given the date, very likely bridge girders for the New Jersey Turnpike, which opened in 1952. The turnpike now parallels the Pennsy line, which today is part of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, while Croxton Yard is mostly gone, replaced by extensive commercial, office, retail, and residential development.

  Facing Westbound Chicago & North Western train no. 401, the Twin Cities 400, pauses at the road’s lakefront depot in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 26, 1951. Introduced in 1935 to compete with the Milwaukee Road and the Burlington Route on the highly competitive Chicago–Minneapolis corridor, the 400 took its name from both the (approximate) number of miles between its terminals and the number of minutes in which it covered them.

  The engine crew of Lehigh & Hudson River freight train HO-6 picks up orders from the operator at Andover, New Jersey, where the L&HR crossed a Lackawanna branch line, on June 28, 1951. The train is the Central States Dispatch, a high-priority freight that seven railroads teamed up to move from Cumberland, Maryland, to Boston, Massachusetts, on a thirty-three-hour schedule. Abbey was riding on assignment for Trains & Travel; his article appeared in the March 1952 issue.

  Travelers hurry through New York City’s Pennsylvania Station on a March day in 1952. Unimaginable at the time, this grand space would be demolished in just a little more than a decade to make way for Madison Square Garden and an office tower. The loss of Penn Station catalyzed the modern preservation movement, leading directly to the passage of New York’s Landmarks Preservation Act in 1965.

  Westbound New York Central passenger train at Central Union Terminal in Toledo, Ohio, in September 1952. The station had opened just two years earlier. Besides the NYC, the twelve-track facility also served the Baltimore & Ohio, Chesapeake & Ohio, and Wabash railroads. Behind the station at left stands the Anthony Wayne Bridge over the Maumee River, also known as the High Level Bridge and completed in 1931.

  In Deshler, Ohio, Baltimore & Ohio’s main line from the East Coast to Chicago crossed its north–south Toledo Division line between Cincinnati and Toledo. On a September day in 1952, Abbey caught passenger trains on both lines in this view looking west, where an eastbound train waits as the observation car of the northbound Cincinnatian clears the crossing. A depot in the northwest quadrant of the crossing, behind the observation car, served trains on both lines.

  One of Illinois Central’s big Mountain-type 4-8-2 locomotives blasts under the McKinley Bridge while its crew grabs orders from the woman operator at Madison, Illinois, on Halloween, 1951. Abbey had just arrived on a Chicago & North Western freight train from Benld, Illinois, running over the Litchfield & Madison. The bridge carried both Route 66 and the Illinois Terminal Railroad over the Mississippi River to St. Louis, and it was named not for the twenty-fifth president of the United States, but for another William McKinley, who had served as chief executive of the IT when the electric interurban line built the bridge in 1910.

  The conductor of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy’s Pioneer Zephyr checks his watch as the train arrives in Galesburg, Illinois, on November 1, 1951. The Pioneer Zephyr was the original of the Burlington’s famous fleet of Zephyr trains. Introduced in 1934, it set a speed record on May 26 of that year by making the 1,015-mile trip from Denver to Chicago in thirteen hours and five minutes. It ran all over the Burlington system until its retirement in 1960, whereupon the railroad donated the train to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, where it can still be seen today.

  Westbound Peoria & Eastern freight train crossing the Middle Fork of the Vermillion River west of Danville, Illinois, on September 26, 1952. The trestle in the foreground carried a recently abandoned line of interurban Illinois Terminal Railroad, which crossed the river valley with a lower bridge and steeper grades. The last train crossed the bridge exactly five months earlier. Abbey was following the P&E all the way from Indianapolis to Peoria.

  New York Central steam locomotives including 0-8-0 no. 7793 inside the railroad’s Beech Grove Shops on August 31, 1953. Beech Grove is in the southeastern quadrant of the Indianapolis metropolitan area. The NYC created the community in 1906 to serve as a railroad shop town. Amtrak operates the shops today.

  One of the Baltimore & Ohio’s massive EM-1 2-8-8-4 steam locomotives noses into its stall between two other engines in the roundhouse at Cumberland, Maryland, on June 27, 1951. Years later, Abbey included this view in his collection of 25 favorites. He wrote: “Behind the scenes, railroading could be grubby business…. Lots of people, railroaders even, deplored the loss the of steam—well, they wanted to keep the romance and glamour of it. But we’ve noticed that even the romanticists didn’t want back everything the steam locomotive took with it!”

  Union Pacific F-series freight diesels from General Motors at Green River, Wyoming, on February 28, 1953, having just arrived with train no. 264 from Pocatello, Idaho. In the distance at right, two 4-8-8-4 Big Boy steam locomotives stand near the coaling tower. The roundhouse is visible beyond them in the background, while the shop buildings are to the left. Abbey was on assignment to cover UP’s unique gas-electric turbine locomotives.

  On Thanksgiving Day in 1948, Union Pacific 4-6-6-4 Challenger steam locomotives wait beneath the coaling tower at North Platte, Nebraska, for their next trip west to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Earlier that year, Union Pacific had upgraded North Platte’s Bailey Yard to a forty-two-track hump facility. This visit provided Abbey with material for his first feature article in Trains magazine, which appeared in the September 1950 issue. Later upgrades have made Bailey the largest classification yard in the world.

  A westbound Union Pacific drag freight with empty Pacific Fruit Express refrigerator cars for the west coast departs Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska, behind a 4-12-2 locomotive on Thanksgiving Day 1948. North Platte was a hub of operations for the big 4-12-2 freight engines, which worked out of the city in three directions: southeast to Kansas City, east to Council Bluffs, Nebraska, and west to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

  Chicago & North Western passenger train no. 501, the westbound Viking, steaming along Devil’s Lake in south-central Wisconsin on a pleasant June afternoon in 1952. Formed by glacial deposits at the end of the last ice age, today Devil’s Lake is the largest state park in the Badger State. Early visitors arrived by train, and the railroad played a major role in establishing tourism at the park.

  Chicago & North Western train no. 400, the eastbound Twin Cities 400, gets a wave from the operator at Clyman Junction, Wisconsin, as shadows grow long on the evening of July 26, 1952. The C&NW opened this railroad, known as the Adams Line for a town through which it passes, in 1911 as a more direct route for trains traveling between Milwaukee and Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

  On a rainy summer day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1952, two boys watch as the Chicago & North Western’s westbound Twin Cities 400 makes its stop at the city’s lakefront depot, near the shore of Lake Michigan. The station opened in 1890 and served nearly one hundred trains a day at its peak, but it would be demolished by the time these children reached adulthood.

  Union Pacific train no. 9, the westbound City of St. Louis, departs Denver Union Station behind four locomotives on the morning of February 26, 1953. The train ran between St. Louis and Los Angeles on a two-day schedule, taking a north–south jog between Denver and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The snow-covered Front Range of the Rocky Mountains stands in the distance.

  Passengers confer with a station worker inside the grand concourse of Kansas City Union Station on April 20, 1953. Completed in the Beaux Arts style in 1914, the station served 670,000 passengers in its busiest year, 1945—the end of World War II. Patronage then dropped sharply until the station closed in 1985, but with strong public/private support for its renovation, it reopened in 1999 as a museum center. Train service returned in 2002.

  Backlit by low winter sun, baggage carts stand on a platform of Om
aha, Nebraska’s Union Station in 1957. Opened in 1931, at its peak in the mid-1940s the Art Deco station hosted sixty-four trains and as many as 10,000 passengers each day. Business declined sharply until passenger service ended in 1971. Two years later, Union Pacific donated the station to the city, which soon made it home of the Durham Museum.

  Union Pacific steam locomotives stand inside the roundhouse at Council Bluffs, Iowa, on a February day in 1957. At left is 2-8-2 no. 2242, a 1913 Baldwin product that was scrapped the following year. Thanks to ventilation hoods over every stall, this roundhouse stayed cleaner than earlier ones. Located across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska, Council Bluffs was the eastern terminus of the first transcontinental railroad. Today its Carnegie Library houses the Union Pacific Museum.