Steel Wheels Rolling: A Personal Journey of Railroad Photography

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

For those born in the middle of the Great Depression and reared during
the Second World War, the sounds, sights, and smells of the railroad (or
railway) world were omnipresent. All the cities, many of the towns, and
not a few of the villages of Canada and the United States were sustained
by their presence in its vast steel matrix. Trains picked up steers from
tiny stockyards and farmers’ milk from wayside stands. They moved
threshing machines from the factories of the Midwest and the cereals
processed by these separators to the ports of the Great Lakes and to
tidewater. They took shoppers to the nearest towns, mining magnates to
their ore bodies in the Canadian Shield, and our fathers, uncles, and
older brothers off to war. Railroads were the crowning glory of the
industrial revolution.

This work is true to its title. The photographs trace a man’s love
affair with railroading—and with its locomotives in
particular—during the course of the great transition from the age of
steam to that of the diesel. The images are organized in chapters keyed
to perspective: the boy’s-eye view, steam, diesel, encounters at
“diamonds” where tracks cross at right or nearly right angles, the
passenger’s, the yardman’s, the trainman on the night shift, the
train crew’s. Short, autobiographical essays, some of them quite
poignant, introduce each chapter. The black-and-white photographs are
masterful. Some summon emotions too powerful for words to express or
contain. See “At dawn on a bitterly cold January 1959 morning,
I[llinois] C[entral] 4-8-2 2613 charges out of Carbondale, Illinois,
with the southbound Cairo Turn.” Steel Wheels Rolling is a genuine
historical document.