Railroad Vision: Steam Era Images from the Trains Magazine Archives

This elegant volume celebrates the 75th anniversary of Trains Magazine, the premier publication in its field.

Drawing on the Trains archive of more than 120,000 images, Jeff Brouws and Wendy Burton have confined their selections for this book to the steam era, selecting 156 photographs that immerse us in that captivating period covering the first half of the twentieth century.

Seen here are legendary locomotives from famous railroads such as New York Central, Norfolk & Western, and Union Pacific and the lost world of the steam short line as well as the intimate details of railroading: gallant locomotive engineers, gritty roundhouse workers, elegantly uniformed conductors. Each photograph is accompanied by an extended caption by Kevin P. Keefe, whose long association with Trains includes stints as editor-in-chief and publisher. Keefe also has written an introductory essay about the history of the magazine and its founder, A. C. Kalmbach, and legendary editor David P. Morgan, and their impact on the field of railroad photography. 156 duo-tone images

Jeff Brouws is a fine art photographer and part-time writer who has nine books to his credit, authoring five on railroad photography alone. He has been published in Trains, the NRHS Bulletin and the R&LHS Quarterly. A book of his own photographs, Approaching Nowhere (also from W. W. Norton) was published in 2006. His photographs can be found in major institutional collections around the country including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Harvard’s Fogg Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Wendy Burton is a photographer whose work is included in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the North Dakota Museum of Art among others. She has worked in the publishing industry for thirty-five years in various capacities. She and her husband Jeff Brouws have produced five books of railroad photography including The Call of Trains, A Passion for Trains, Steam: An Enduring Legacy, Some Vernacular Railroad Photographs and A Steam Odyssey.

Kevin P. Keefe is vice president-editorial for Kalmbach Publishing Co., publishers of Trains magazine. He joined the Trains staff in 1987 and was Editor from 1992 through 2000. He is also a Director of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art. Keefe was born in Chicago in 1951 and grew up in Niles, Michigan. He graduated from Michigan State University’s School of Journalism in 1973. He worked for various daily newspapers in Michigan before joining the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1980. Keefe lives in Milwaukee and writes frequently for Trains and its sister magazine, Classic Trains.