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The great American photographer David Plowden has died at the age of 93.  Among the 22 books that he wrote, Railfan & Railroad readers probably know best Farewell to Steam (1966), A Time of Trains (1987), and Requiem for Steam (2010), but Plowden’s oeuvre also included definitive volumes on other subjects, including Lincoln and His America (1970) and Bridges: The Spans of North America (1974, reprinted ten years later).

Born in 1932, Plowden spent much of his childhood in New York City.  Throughout his youth, he rode trains in the New York area, in New England, and across the U.S., and he made friends with enginemen and train crews.  He reached adulthood and chose to make a living as a photographer in the 1950s, a decade defined in railroading by dieselization.  In the preface to his 1997 retrospective book Imprints, Plowden wrote, “I was born astride two eras.  The fact that the demise of the steam locomotive and the beginning of my career occurred simultaneously was a coincidence that determined the course of my life.  It was that initial sense of loss – and perhaps that my father died later the same year [1960] – that greatly influenced the way I view the world.  It also made me keenly aware of photography’s unmatched ability to preserve the moment and, thereby, to capture things on film before they disappeared.”

Plowden began his photography as a railfan: He made his very first photo, at age 11, of a steam locomotive leading a Boston & Maine passenger train into Putney, Vermont, near the summer house that his well-to-do parents had bought a few years earlier.  Capturing steam before it disappeared drove Plowden’s efforts for more than 15 years and even led him to apply for his first job after college as a management trainee on the Great Northern Railway.  Assigned as assistant to the trainmaster at Willmar, on the Minnesota prairie, the 22-year-old had a front-row seat over the winter of 1955-56 as O-8 2-8-2s worked freights through the snow-covered landscape, and Plowden made spectacular photos of them with his 2-1/4 camera.  More than thirty years later, he opened A Time of Trains with a 10,000-word essay about his January cabride aboard 4-8-2 No. 2505; without any accompanying photographs, Plowden takes the reader along, sitting behind the fireman, as old Brown the engineer coaxes the 31-year-old locomotive to 91 miles an hour through the freezing darkness – as riveting a tale of steam at speed as anyone has ever set down on paper.

Canadian Pacific P-1b 2-8-2 5145 at Montreal’s Angus Shops in March 1960. Photo by David Plowden. 

Before going out on his own, Plowden spent about four years studying photography and working for established professionals, first as O. Winston Link’s assistant in 1958-59; Plowden accompanied Link on a number of trips to document the Norfolk & Western.  He also spent time as a student of Minor White’s in Rochester, N.Y., and learned invaluable lessons that stayed with him throughout his later career.  In an interview for the afterword to David Plowden’s Iowa (2012), he said, “I never saw such prints as Minor made.  And I can remember Ansel [Adams] came . . . and the two of them were in the darkroom together one day . . . .  There was great rivalry there.  I felt that I was in the darkroom with Poseidon and Zeus.  One was throwing tridents, and the other was throwing thunderbolts.  They were arguing the points of order.  And here were these two great, great printers – some of the greatest printers who ever lived – arguing.  Imagine being in the corner listening to this.”

With the steam era effectively over, Plowden realized that his work as a photographer had just begun.  Continuing in the Imprints preface, he wrote, “It began to dawn on me that I hadn’t simply been documenting steam locomotives in their final hour.  I was witnessing something of far greater consequence: the transformation of a culture.  In this light, the body of my work depicts an America almost unrecognizable from the one that I began photographing 40 years ago.  The urgency to record has become ever more imperative as I have tried vainly to stay one step ahead of the wrecking ball.”

Plowden’s subjects over time came to include steamboats, bridges, barns, steel mills, and all aspects of the rural Midwest, including its people and their homes.  After tens of thousands of miles of traveling by car from coast to coast while researching and photographing for Lincoln and Bridges, Plowden moved from Long Island, New York, to suburban Chicago in 1978, and he taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology for a few years, then for a few more at the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism.  Plowden loved Iowa, and all of the Great Plains.  “I think I have more pictures of Iowa than any place.  Quite seriously,” he said in Iowa.  From 1988 to 2007, Plowden served as a visiting professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

Central Vermont Railway Extra 464 North meeting Extra 472 South at Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1954. Photo by David Plowden. 

Although not a “railfan photographer” in the same mold as his contemporaries Phil Hastings (born in 1925), Richard Steinheimer (1929), Jim Shaughnessy (1933), and J. Parker Lamb (1933), Plowden maintained close ties to Train World.  A friend of Center for Railroad Photography & Art founder John Gruber (born in 1936), he presented at a number of the CRP&A’s Conversations conferences, including the first one, and the Center has a traveling exhibition of prints that Plowden donated to the organization; entitled “Requiem for Steam,” it has visited almost a dozen venues from California to Connecticut since 2010.  More than 40 years after graduating from Yale University, in 1995, Plowden arranged for Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to become the repository of his complete archive, including negatives, prints, slides, journals, audio tapes, and more.  One can learn more about Plowden’s life and work at DavidPlowden.com.

Plowden’s survivors include his four children and their children, as well as his second wife, Sandra Oakes Schoellkopf Plowden, to whom he dedicated books in which he included heartfelt thanks to her.  At the close of the acknowledgments in Imprints, he wrote, “I am so glad you and I happened to be alive at the same time.”

For the afterword to Iowa, Plowden wrote, “I remember a train going across Kansas, and I went in the dining car, and all the blinds were pulled down.  I sat down and pulled a blind up.  There weren’t many people in the car.  The steward came by and pulled the shade down and he said, ‘There’s nothing to look at, son.’  And I thought to myself, ‘What do you mean there’s nothing to look at?  Look at this beautiful expanse of land.’  So I lifted up the shade, and haven’t pulled it down since when crossing Kansas or Iowa or anywhere else.”  On behalf of all of the people who have admired and taken inspiration from sixty years of Plowden photos, thank you, David, for keeping on looking: We are so glad to have been alive to see the world through your eyes.

—Oren B. Helbok

The post David Plowden, Noted Documentary Photographer and Author, Dies at 93 appeared first on Railfan & Railroad Magazine.

Union Pacific said its revised application to acquire Norfolk Southern — a deal that would create a 50,000-mile rail system covering 43 states — is “comprehensive and complete.” The Class I railroad made that statement in response to criticism from rivals that have said the proposed merger to create the nation’s largest railroad and the first single-transcontinental system would upend the industry’s competitive balance.

On April 30, UP submitted an amended application to the U.S. Surface Transportation Board, three months after the federal regulator rejected its first attempt last year as “incomplete.” Since then, rival railroads have been piling on the more than 7,000-page filing, urging the STB to reject it again.

UP officials state that they have provided additional details regarding their acquisition of NS, including an updated analysis that uses actual traffic data from all six North American Class I carriers. In the past, merger analyses have only used data provided by the STB. That more detailed analysis also allowed the railroads to provide a more accurate picture of proposed capacity improvements. In fact, the railroads said they would spend less on capacity now that they had a clearer picture of what they needed to do.

“After completing the additional work requested by the STB, the facts remain clear: This merger enhances competition and delivers real public benefits that make America’s supply chain stronger,” said Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena. “Our analysis uses complete systemwide traffic data provided by all Class I railroads to identify even more opportunities for our combined railroad to grow and compete.”

Additionally, UP and NS announced that they would not move to control the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis. Instead, as a condition of the merger, the two Class Is would sell some of their shares to other carriers so that the combined railroad would not control more than 50 percent of it. UP presently owns 42.84 percent of the railroad and NS owns 14.29 percent, with other Class Is owning the remainder.

But not everyone supports the creation of a single, coast-to-coast railroad. The day before the revised merger application was submitted, the Stop the Rail Merger Coalition was launched to argue against it. Along with BNSF and CPKC, the coalition includes the American Chemistry Council, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Teamsters Rail Conference, the Alliance for Chemical Distribution, the National Industrial Transportation League and the Vinyl Institute. Among the group’s chief arguments against the merger is how the last major UP acquisition — the takeover of Southern Pacific in 1996 — wreaked havoc on the rail network for months.

“This did not begin with a customer asking for a UP-NS merger to happen,” said BNSF Railway President and CEO Katie Farmer. “It’s driven by Wall Street on the promise of a big shareholder payout. It will eliminate competition, raise costs for consumers, and destabilize the supply chain that powers the American economy.”

Since then, the chorus of opposition has only grown louder. On May 8, BNSF filed a formal response to the application with the STB. In it, the rival accused UP of simply making “cosmetic changes [to the application] to gloss over the serious and fundamental competition, pricing and service concerns that were previously raised.” Another issue raised by BNSF was that UP and NS did not address the possibility of an “end game” round of mergers. According to the 2001 merger rules established by the STB, any Class I merger application would have to include analysis about not just the proposed combination, but those that could likely follow.

CPKC, CSX Transportation and Canadian National have also lined up against the merger, echoing BNSF’s concerns that the revised application is incomplete and should be rejected again — something that has never happened twice. Of the four rival Class Is, CN has appeared to hold its cards closest to the vest. In a statement, CN officials said the application was still incomplete, and that if it were approved, “remedies” would be necessary, perhaps leaving the door open for future support of the consolidation. In the past, CN has been no stranger to major merger moves, perhaps most notably trying to combine with BNSF in the late 1990s. For its part, UP has said it would pull out of the merger if the STB were to force widespread line sales or trackage rights agreements on it.

Stakeholders had until May 8 to submit comments on the revised application, and UP had until May 12 to respond, which it did, arguing that it had met the high standards expected by the STB. Now the industry waits until May 30, when the federal regulator is anticipated to make a decision on whether the application will be accepted or rejected again.

—Justin Franz 

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