05/30/02

BY HAWES SPENCER

Blessed with passenger service on two different lines, Charlottesville may have the last word in train travel. Roanoke, however, has the last word in train pictures.

Construction began last week to convert an abandoned 1905 passenger depot in downtown Roanoke to a museum housing the work of famed rail photographer O. Winston Link.

Link, who died last year at age 86, spent the late 1950s documenting the last days of American steam trains-- including his high-contrast nighttime shots of steam locomotives chugging through rural Virginia.

"He saw the Interstate Highway System being built and communities decentralizing, and he wanted to capture a disappearing way of life," says Kent Chrisman, director of the History Museum and Historical Society of Western Virginia.

Chrisman's helping the group best known as Center in the Square take the station back to the way it appeared after a 1949 make-over by famed architect/industrial designer Raymond Loewy, best known for shaping the Greyhound Bus and the Coke bottle.

The station served its final customer in 1971, when Amtrak was created and when the city formerly known as Big Lick lost its passenger service. [The station could even see rail passengers again, if the TransDominion Express ever materializes. See sidebar.]

To shoot his photographs, which often required long strings of lights, Link received remarkable cooperation from the Norfolk & Western Railroad, now Norfolk Southern, America's final operator of commercial steam freight and passenger trains. Would Link have been happy with these plans?

"He's actually the one who suggested this site for his museum," says Chrisman.

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