Howes Honored with R&LHS Award Category

Former railroad executive William F. Howes Jr. is being honored by the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society with an award named after him.

The society has created a seventh category to its Railway History Awards program that will recognize “excellence in magazine journalism devoted to past or present passenger rail service.”

It will be named the William F. Howes Jr. Passenger Rail Article Award with the winner receiving a certificate and a $250 honorarium.

Howes spent most of his career working for the Baltimore & Ohio and Chessie System railroads. This included a stint as vice president of passenger services for the B&O and Chesapeake & Ohio railroads.

Howes, who died earlier this year, also served as R&LHS president from 1994 to 2003.

In an unrelated announcement, the R&LHS has awarded two $2,500 research grants to the Center for Railroad Photography & Art and Chicago author Sandra Jackson-Opoku.

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, the CRP&A will use its grant to help sort, categorize, and conserve photo collections of longtime industry senior executives James McClellan of Norfolk Southern (1939-2016) and Railroad Development Chairman Henry Posner III, to make them accessible for public research.

Jackson-Opoku is a retired academic, literary scholar, and author of prose, poetry, and drama. She is working on research and revisions of Black Rice, a historical novel that explores centuries-long connections between China and people of African descent.

 “The role of Cantonese immigrants in building the Transcontinental Railroad is well-documented. Less recognized is their work on southern railroads, and the resulting contact zones that developed between the Chinese immigrants and African American communities,” she wrote in her grant application.

In particular Jackson-Opoku is interested in 19th-century Mississippi railroad culture.

Railroad Historian Thomas Tabor Dies

Railroad author and historian Thomas T. “Tom” Taber III died last Saturday at age 93 in Montoursville, Pennsylvania.

A life member of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society, Tabor created a personal research library and assisted other railroad historians.

He specialized in corporate railroad history and the history of Northeast logging railroads.

With Benjamin F.G. Kline and Walter Casler, Tabor produced and published in the 1970s a 14-volume work about logging railroads of Pennsylvania.

Tabor was co-author with Casler of the 1960 book Climax: An Unusual Steam Locomotive.

He also wrote several books about and collected photographs of short line and minor railroads in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Tabor’s 1987 Railroads of Pennsylvania Encyclopedia and Atlas provided detail and corporate histories of every stretch of railroad line constructed in the commonwealth, as well as railroads chartered but never built.

His Tabor Index of the R&LHS Bulletin/Railroad History is considered the best index of the publication covering the period 1921 to 2009.

Along with his father, Thomas T. Tabor, the junior Tabor received the 1983 George W. and Constance M. Hilton Book Award presented by the R&LHS. The award recognized the Tabors three-volume history of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad.

He received the organization’s Gerald M. Best Senior Achievement Award in 2016 for a significant and longstanding contribution to the writing, preservation, and interpretation of railroad history.

This included overseeing and cataloguing the R&LHS’s artifact collection in 1992.

Tabor also produced a four-volume Guide to Railroad Historical Resources, United States and Canada, a listing guide of the holdings of various transportation archives throughout North America.

The Thomas T. Taber Museum of the Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, is named in his honor.

R&LHS Announces Award Winners

The Railway & Locomotive Historical Society has announced the winners of its 2020 railroad history awards. The organization said the COVID-19 pandemic delayed naming the winners.

The awards went to John P. Hankey of Omaha, Nebraskas, Gerald M. Best Senior Achievement Award; Brian Solomon of Center Conway, New Hampshire, Fred A. and Jane R. Stindt Photography Award; William L. Withuhn (posthumous), George W. and Constance M. Hilton Book Award; and Bill Leistiko of Wichita, Kansas, David P. Morgan Article Award.

The Morgan award for article writing for 2019 also was announced and went to Gregg Ames of St. Louis.

Hankey was honored for his half-century of professional involvement in railway preservation.

He is a former manager at the B&O Museum in Baltimore and has consulted for museums, historical societies, projects, and film/television/radio productions.

Hankey has written more than 100 articles on railroad history, preservation, or interpretation.

Withuhn (1941-2017) worked for 27 years for the Smithsonian Institution, much of it as curator of transportation. His book American Steam Locomotives: Design and Development, 1880-1960, was published by the Indiana University Press with the financial support of the R&LHS.

The publication is a comprehensive engineering study of the steam locomotive between 1880 and the end of steam operation in common-carrier service.

He died in 2017 at age 75 before the manuscript was ready. It was completed by his widow, Gail, and the late Peter A. Hansen, a former editor of Railroad History.

Solomon was recognized for having authored and illustrated more than 60 books.

His articles and photography have appeared in Trains, Railway Age, Railroad Explorer, Railfan & Railroad, and National Railway Historical Society Bulletin as well as several publications in Europe.

Leistiko was wrote a three-part series, “Silvis Shops” that was published in Remember the Rock Vol. 12, Nos. 1 and 2 (2018); Vol. 12, Nos. 3 and 4 (2018); and Vol. 13, Nos. 1 and 2 (2019).

The articles offered an overview of the shops of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad.

Ames wrotre “Mother Hubbards’ Bone of Contention: In Search of the ICC ‘Ban’ on Mother Hubbard Locomotives,” which was published in Railroad History No. 219 (Fall-Winter 2018).

The article sought evidence for the oft-mentioned but never documented Interstate Commerce Commission “ban” on the use of Camelback-type steam locomotives, which place the cab astride the boiler.

Ames said he found no ICC rulings or orders banning the locomotives.

Grant Wins RL&HS Research Grant

Former University of Akron history professor H. Roger Grant has received a $2,500 grant from the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society to be used for his research into station agent-operators.

H. Roger Grant

Grant, who is the Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professor of history at Clemson University, is writing a book about agents, who represent a nearly extinct occupation that was once essential to transportation.

His grant came from the John H. White Jr. Research Fellowship.

Grant, a life member of the Akron Railroad Club, has written or edited 35 academic books.

Also receiving a grant was the Center for Rail Photography & Art, which will use it to examine the role of videography in railroading.

The grant will be used for a multimedia project titled “Railroads and the Moving Image,” which will consider the evolution and production of railroad videography and its place within the realm of railroad imagery.

R&LHS Announces Grant Award Winners

The Center for Railroad Photography and Art has received a research grant from the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society that the center will use to continue a program to bring railroad photographs to a broader audience.

The $2,500 grant was awarded through the William D. Middleton Research Fellowship and follows up on earlier funding provided last year for the research and curation efforts on the project, known as After Promontory: 150 Years of Transcontinental Railroading.

The Center, based in Madison, Wisconsin, is seeking to expand its traveling exhibition and related programming.

The R&LHS also announced that author Tony Reevy of Durham, North Carolina, won the John H. White, Jr. Research Fellowship of $2,250 to be used for researching material for a book on the railroad photography of the late Philip R. Hastings that is expected to be released in fall 2022.

Durham has a contract with Indiana University Press to publish the book, which will feature the best of Hastings’ photography that has never been published.

In a news release announcing the awarding of the grant, R&LHS noted that Hastings is the most notable American railroad-subject photographer of the mid-20th century who has not yet been profiled in a book.

Reevy, who is director of development for North Carolina State University’s Institute for Emerging Issues, has published books titled O. Winston Link: Life Along the Line – A Photographic Portrait of America’s Last Great Steam Railroad (Abrams, 2012) and The Railroad Photography of Jack Delano (Indiana University Press, 2015).

Grant Receives R&LHS Research Fellowship

Akron Railroad Club member H. Roger Grant has been awarded a $2,500 research fellowship by the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society.

Grant, a history professor at Clemson University, will use his award to research a book-length study of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad.

The project will explore the long, complicated history of the rail line made famous by the song Rock Island Line by Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter.

Many contemporary railroad enthusiasts know the Rock Island as a bankrupt carrier that was among the few railroads not to join Amtrak in 1971. The Rock operated for nearly 130 before being liquidated.

Grant came to Clemson in 1996 from the University of Akron, where he had been teaching history since 1970. In 2006, Grant was awarded the Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professorship by Clemson.

Specializing in U.S. history, especially transportation history and American railroads, Grant has written or edited 33 academic books. His latest book, John W. Barriger III: Railroad Legend, will be published in Spring 2018 by Indiana University Press.

Also awarded a fellowship by R&LHS was Scott E. Randolph of Redlands, California.

Randolph graduated from Rutgers University with a B.A. in History and went on to receive his master’s from the University of Akron, and a Ph.D. from Purdue University.

He has taught at Purdue, Wyoming, and Armstrong Atlantic State Universities and in 2011 joined the faculty of the University of Redlands.

His areas of research include the culture of capitalism, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and transportation history with an emphasis on railways.

He is curator and associate archivist for the Erie Lackawanna Historical Society and editor for the Society for the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

He will use his R&LHS grant to study a mostly forgotten, yet essential example of Progressive-era regulatory law, the 1913 Federal Valuation Act.

It was intended to establish a rational, scientific base-line for railroad rates. The law provided for a physical valuation of the assets of every common carrier railroad in the country.

Neither railroads nor their regulators possessed a systematic understanding of the cost of providing transportation and thus pricing and its regulation were effected largely ad hoc.

In part because of its seemingly irrational basis, rate-making was central to the “Railroad Problem” that permeated political discourse into the 1930s.

Ex-ARRC Member Wins R&LHS Research Grant

A former Akron Railroad Club member has received one of two research fellowships that were awarded his year by the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society.

Stephen Titchenal won a $1,500 award that he will use to support the development of finding aids, digitalization and digital publication of U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission railroad valuation maps and engineering notes.

Winning a $2,226 fellowship was Simon Cordery of Monmouth, Illinois, who is a professor of history at Western Illinois University.

Cordery will use his grant to conduct research for a book about the Pullman strike of 1894 to be titled Pullman Revisited.

He will travel to the library of the California State Railroad Museum and to the California State Archives. Cordery will reassess the strike by examining responses to and attitudes about Pullman around the United States and in Europe, where the company was trying to expand operations.

Titchenal, a retired teacher, maintains a website with various documents pertaining to railroad rights of ways. The site is http://www.railsandtrails.com.

The ICC began documenting in the early 20^th century the rights-of-way of all common carrier steam railroads.

Titchenal works with railroad historical societies, libraries, and government agencies to digitize and make available their valuation as well as other map collections.

The Cleveland Heights resident presented a program at the January 2012 ARRC meeting that featured some of his work.

This is the fourth year the R&LHS has awarded the fellowships, which are named for railroad scholars William D. Middleton and John H. White, Jr. An R&LHS review committee chose the recipients.

Author To Write About Cincinnati Car Builder

An Indiana writer has been awarded a railroad history fellowship to research a Cincinnati car builder.

William Benning Stewart of Greenwood, Ind., received $2,500 from the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society that he will use to write Queen City Carbuilder, a history of the Cincinnati Car Company.

The 250-300 page book will begin with an overview of Cincinnati’s rich social and economic history as a fertile setting for such an enterprise at the start of the 20th century.

The book will touch upon the founders who developed and operated the company from Philadelphia syndicate-affiliated traction magnates to trained engineers to skilled and unskilled laborers. It also will trace the development of each of the company’s product lines and depict them in their operating environments.

Awarded a $2,000 fellowship was Tony Reevy of Durham, N.C. He is developing a book titled The Railroad Photography of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg.

Cuyahoga Falls Man Wins RR History Grant

A Cuyahoga Falls man has won a $2,500 grant from the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society to help him write a book about the Youngstown & Southeastern Railroad.

Matthew C. Hiner is a history professor at Lakeland Community College and his book will be titled “Death and Rebirth of the Youngstown & Southeastern Railroad, 1975-2012.”

The book would be a follow-up on an article that Hiner wrote for Railroad History in 2004 titled: “Fifty Years too Soon: How an Innovative Interurban Bent the Rules to Cut Rates in the Ohio Coal Fields.”

Hiner’s research explores the Y&S in the Great Depression. His proposed book “offers an opportunity to explore the important topic of late twentieth century deindustrialization on a local level, examining how the fight to save a regional railroad impacted not just the Mahoning Valley, but Ohio’s larger economy and larger rail carriers as a whole.”

Also winning a grant was Jeff Brouws of Standford, N.Y., a photographer and writer who is conducting research on the history and development of southern railroad photography with an emphasis on photographers working between 1920 and 1960.

Brouws has written about prominent railroad photographers during the steam-to-diesel transition but his latest work will explore “the anonymous, unsung, and underrepresented amateur railroad photographers who have, in reality, taken the bulk of railroad photos made over the last century.”

Most recently Brouws with his wife, Wendy Burton, published a book titled Some Vernacular Railroad Photographs.

This is the second year that the R&LHS has awarded the fellowships, named for railroad scholars William D. Middleton and John H. White, Jr. An R&LHS review committee chose the recipients.