"The Last Steam Railroad in America": Shaffers Crossing, Roanoke, Virginia, 1958

September 11 didn't change everything, but it changed a lot. Consider, for example, what it changed for those of us who take pictures of the built environment. No matter how fatuous yellow and orange alerts may seem, photographing bridges, mills, or railroads can look suspicious, and it will often attract the attention of the authorities. Now, for most historians, cameras are only a hobby. But not always. Take John Stilgoe, author of the prizewinning Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (1983) and a scholar who, in his own words, has "made photographs all over the United States as part of my employment at Harvard University." Having been hassled in recent times, Stilgoe reports that he has "been legally briefed by both my own attorneys and those of my employer."

To those for whom taking photos is not connected with their employment, however, and who don't have recourse to Harvard lawyers—that is, hobbyists—Stilgoe recommends a book published, it so happens, in September 2001; the author is a Portland, Oregon, attorney named Bert P. Krages, and it is titled Legal Handbook for Photographers: The Rights and Liabilities of Making Images. Legalities, Krages explains, are "premised on balancing the right of photographers to document the world against the rights of others to enjoy their privacy and property." Photographers who do not understand "what, where, and when they can photograph" tend toward "blissful ignorance, extreme caution, or reckless abandon." Which brings me to the image on the cover of this issue.

In the fall of 1958 I went on the road. My prophet was not so much Jack Kerouac as it was Jack's pal Dean Moriarty, in whose life there "was always a schedule." My schedule entailed tracking down various sorts of devices that Lewis Mumford had dubbed paleotechnic, especially steam railroad locomotives. There weren't many of these still operating, not in the United States anyway. Official statistics listed 1,488 extant, but a majority would never again turn a wheel under power. In the preceding thirty years the number had fallen precipitously: 1,488 in 1958 compared with 34,581 in 1948, 42,210 in 1938, and 67,563 in 1928. (During the same period of time, the number of diesel locomotives had gone from a handful to nearly 30,000.) I found steam in Durango and Cheyenne, Duluth and Detroit. By far the largest number of locomotives still in daily service, however, were operated by the Norfolk and Western Railway out of Williamson, West Virginia, and Roanoke, Virginia, over the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east and on through Ohio to the west. There were more than 250. Even here the end seemed near, though the timetable was vague. The last years of N&W steam were later made famous by O. Winston Link, whose stunning nighttime flash photos would eventually hang in the Museum of Modern Art. But management was not making any big deal of the impending transition—quite the contrary. When western and midwestern railroads first began substituting diesels for steam—whether transcontinental lines like the Santa Fe or regionals like the Monon in Indiana—they did so with a flourish. For bosses and stockholders, if not for workers in a great variety of occupations, "dieselization" represented technological progress, pure and simple; one heard it said time and again that diesels "saved railroads from bankruptcy." Certain lines had to step lightly, however, lines for which coal provided a large share of the traffic—the Illinois Central and the Pennsylvania, for example, and especially the "Pocahontas" roads, the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O), the Norfolk and Western (N&W), and the Virginian. These had to weigh the goodwill of the mining industry against the ever more obvious advantages of diesels, and sugarcoat the transition with pledges to keep steam "wherever it was economically justified."

For a short time after World War II, articles appeared...