This series is modeled after the “Interesting Railfan” series in Railroad magazine from years ago. I’m asking each railfan 10 questions, some standard and some customized for the particular person. I hope you enjoy it. (See all in the series).
For this edition, I asked noted photographer Oren B. Helbok ten questions.
Lead photo: Oren B. and John E. Helbok at Port Clinton, Pa., in June 2021 – Dan Cupper photo
1. Tell us a little about yourself.
Born in the Bronx in 1965, I ran away from a steam locomotive the first time that I saw one, at age 2, but I very quickly turned around, and since then I have photographed and ridden steam trains from approximately coast to coast. Beginning at age 6-3/4 with a film camera handed down by my father, John, I learned the technical aspects of black & white photography from him, including how to develop film and make prints. I absorbed the compositional and storytelling aspects of photography from my father and from the many, many books and magazines about trains that I began poring over long before I could read. My mother, Miriam, also aided and abetted my passion, including by taking me on trips across Canada and around the British Isles by train.
After having children in the late 1990s, I took a decade-plus-long break from “serious” photography (although I took many thousands of snapshots of the kids during that time). I started up again, with a borrowed digital camera, in 2009; I shortly bought one of my own and never looked back.
Now using my second, third, and fourth DSLRs, I have made close to 200,000 digital images. After last working in a darkroom in 1998, I use free, downloadable GIMP software – “the poor man’s Photoshop” – and let others do the printing.
I offer boundless thanks to the hundreds if not thousands of people — railroaders, other fans and photographers, friends, and strangers — who have opened up Train World to me and who have helped in countless ways and shown countless kindnesses through the years. I also offer boundless thanks to everyone who accompanies me at trackside these days; I almost never railfan alone anymore, and in fact I had to rent a minivan for the last fall-foliage trip of Reading & Northern No. 2102 in October 2024 because so many people wanted to ride in the Chasemobile®! For more of my photography, please visit WhereSteamLives.net, Facebook.com/wheresteamlives, and instagram.com/wheresteamlives.
L: My very first photo, made at age 6-3/4 of Reading 2102 in May of 1972; M: my father’s photo made at almost the exact same instant; and (R) the chase crew that weekend – my father in the back; three of his high-school students; and me in front.
2. Why do you like trains?
I cannot say why I like trains. I can offer some thoughts about why lots of people do, and why trains and railroading have such an important place in our culture. For one, a railroad track (similar to a road) going off into the distance simply begs us to consider the world beyond where we stand: It draws us and makes us think about other places out of sight and far away. The sound of a train going by in the distance likewise draws us; no rubber-tired vehicle’s noise has quite the same effect, and a superhighway’s-worth of them only deafen. Also, steam locomotives make human-like noises: They sigh, they cry, and an air pump sounds like a beating heart. And in their exhalations they bring the clouds above down to Earth: We cannot touch a cloud, but we can touch and even breathe the cloud that exudes from a steam locomotive’s cylinder cocks. Magical.
I’ll let the great David P. Morgan (editor of Trains Magazine from 1953 to 1987) sum up my thoughts: “The fan is not an easy man to understand. Railroading for him is simply too big, too private, and too obvious an emotion to be able to explain. . . . It seldom occurs to him to be introspective about it, but even if he were, he could do little more than acknowledge the influence of a boyhood spent at the depot or a father who once worked in the shops at Sedalia or an Ives train set of tender memory.” (The Railfan, 1962)
3. Where’s your favourite place to railfan?
Alongside a hot boiler with friends.
Reading & Northern 2102 passing through New Ringgold, Pa., on October 26th, 2024, as seen by John Riley on the left and at almost the same instant by the photographer lying on the ground in John’s photo – me.
4. If you could railfan anywhere, anytime, where and when would it be?
You want me to narrow this down to just ONE place and time?!? All right, I’ll try. Having fallen in love with trains along the New York Central’s Electric Division, I might choose Croton-Harmon, N.Y., where electrics changed for steam and vice versa, during the later years of World War II or shortly thereafter – until 1949, say, by which time the Central had bought some Alco PAs, my favorite diesels. I remember seeing NYC P-motor and S-motor electric locomotives in the Bronx as a boy; both of them had wheels pretty much from end to end underneath, making them fascinating in a Brobdingnagian-insect way. And of course the steam locomotive designers’ art reached a high-water mark with the NYC’s J-class Hudsons; I would give almost anything to have seen them in person. (The last Hudson departed Harmon twelve years to the day before my birth. So close and yet so far . . .)
Identically-many-wheeled electrics took over from steam at Harrisburg on the Pennsy, as GG1s and K4s rubbed shoulders – but you made me choose just one place.
5. You’ve talked about the influence your father had on your love of steam and your photography.
What advice would you give “railfan parents” about encouraging their children’s interests?
One can define “railfan parent” in two ways: as the parent of a railfan, and as a railfan who has offspring. It should go without saying that, in both cases, a parent should support a child’s interests, whether or not they align with the parent’s. I gave my kids plenty of exposure to trains; we had some good times together (and my son even had a photo of a steam locomotive that he made at age 5 published in Railfan & Railroad), but they found their passion elsewhere. For a parent of a railfan, and regardless of that parent’s interests, I urge her or him to try to offer a range of activities – riding and photographing, steam and diesel (even trolleys!) – and exposure to other people: Encourage your child to talk to the other fans on the photo line, to the other kid watching shyly on the station platform, and to the train crews wherever possible; you never know when an engineman will say “Come on up.” And for those kids who do take up photography, I urge the parents to help them make prints and give them to railroaders and to other fans – a hugely effective way to turn strangers into friends.
6. Rods down or up?
Down.
7. Let’s talk about colour.
Looking through your portfolio, I notice that most of your photos are not very “colourful”. They are either black and white, or the colours are muted. For colour photos, is this a conscious decision?
It probably comes down to the black & white photos by other people that I looked at and absorbed as a boy (with Plowden, Steinheimer, Hastings, Shaughnessy, Benson, and John E. Helbok at the top of the long list; the very first railroad book that my father bought, Plowden’s Farewell to Steam, has some of the finest railroad photographs ever made). I’ll go out on a limb here: A good black & white photo has more power than most great color ones. Color can distract, whereas black & white offers us an abstract look at the world, just light and dark and form. For 25 years, I used almost exclusively black & white film, so I learned to unconsciously think in black & white. I should say that I learned to FEEL in black & white: Even now, when I bring up an image on my computer screen, I almost never know whether I will process it in black & white or in color until I start playing with it, but I can usually pretty quickly feel which one looks right for any given image.
Most of the current generation of photographers whom I rub elbows with at trackside have never used film, but some of them know how to see – and feel – in black & white anyway. And without a doubt some of them have influenced the way that I look and see and photograph: Check out my friend John Riley’s work (flickr.com/photos/138778578@N02). I can point you to a few of his photos that have profoundly influenced the way that I now try to see railroading. What a joy that two people 35 years apart in age can learn from each other: As much as I might serve as some sort of mentor (and certainly as his Chasemobile® driver), John inspires me.
In June 2024, No. 2102 made her first trip through the Lehigh Gorge in more than 50 years; I photographed her in the morning crossing the river northbound on the former Lehigh Valley Railroad bridge at White Haven, Pa. That afternoon, one of her crewmen, Ryan Bausher, took a quiet moment as he oversaw refilling the tender with water at Tunkhannock, Pa.
8. What’s “the one that got away” for you?
Oh, my, another l-o-n-g list to choose from. But let’s open this up a little: Rather than choose one locomotive or one railroad, I wish that I had photographed the people of railroading long before I started to. Of all of those volunteers (and plenty of employees too) who welcomed me into their world in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, and beyond, I made photos of a shockingly small number of them. As an example of what I missed in one place, at South Amboy, New Jersey, I photographed GG1s and E-units as they exchanged trains, but I have exactly TWO photos of the car knockers working at making the hitches. And I have NO photos of the men who operated the manual gates at the two street crossings in the station area there. Ugh.
9. When is railway photography art and when is it documentary? Can it be both? Neither?
Depending on the image, it can qualify as both, one or the other, or neither. A tight three-quarter wedge of a locomotive, without any of the trackside context, will almost certainly qualify as neither. A documentary photo tells a story – perhaps a simple one, perhaps a complex one. An art photograph . . . well, I cannot adequately define it, but I know it when I see it. I can say that I like the definition of “art” in my venerable American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (originally published in 1969; I have the eighth edition, from 1971): “1. Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature. 2. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty; specifically, the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.”
For examples of art and documentary photos, and images that unquestionably deserve both labels, see Greg McDonnell’s 2003 book Canadian Pacific: Stand fast, Craigallachie! The very first photo inside the book shows a detail of the snow-crusted truck frame of a CPR business car; one can instantly tell which direction the car has traveled by the patterns in the snow. On the next page, a detail of an ancient rail, half buried in grain, at an elevator in Alberta. These photos (both in color, as it happens) tell stories. And both required unusual perception and unusual vantage points, low and even at ground level. Greg put conscious thought and effort into their compositions: He made art. (I’d hazard that he also FELT them, but he and I have not yet had that conversation.)
Four pages farther on in the book, one finds an extraordinary photo in black & white, made with the camera on a railhead, looking directly along the rail at the wheel and truck details of a freight car – an image unlike any other that I have ever seen. Unlike the previous two examples, I cannot clearly say what story the photo tells, but I believe that even most non-railfans would instantly recognize it as fine art indeed.
Reading & Northern No. 2102’s eccentric crank, and R. & N. volunteer crewman Keith Strobel lubricating her running gear at Pittson Junction, Pa., in August 2024
10. What project(s) do you have on the go, or in planning?
Like Dennis Livesey, I have made a start on scanning my old negatives. (I actually photograph them, using my Nikon D850 and a macro lens.) Dennis has made a much better start than I have: A few of my projects have led to completing a few “sets” – all of my Black River & Western photos, all of my GG1 photos – but I’ve got a l-o-n-g way to go.
For more of my photography, please visit WhereSteamLives.net, Facebook.com/wheresteamlives, and instagram.com/wheresteamlives.
Thank you, Oren!