The days of the steam engine are long gone, but the era lives on in the photographs of Philip Ross Hastings, a Bradford, Vt., native whose claim to fame lies in his evocative mid-century pictures of the American railroad.
Hastings, who was born in 1925 and died in 1987, was a psychiatrist lauded for his contributions to the field, but he arguably became better known for his photography, which appeared regularly in such railroading bibles as Trains and Classic Trains.
“Through His Lens,” an exhibition of some of his best-known train pictures, is now on view at the Bradford Historical Society museum in the Bradford Academy building. It will likely continue through next summer. Curator Diane Smarro, who is also a member of the board of the historical society, worked both from original prints in the historical society’s archives and from copies of pictures published in various train magazines. The pictures, none of which were made from the original negatives, were blown up to exhibition size.
The photographs, about 125 in all, are exhibited on movable panels. They include scenes of life both in Hastings’ hometown and in rural Vermont during the 1930s and 1940s, among them sugaring, strawberry picking, the aftermath of the 1938 hurricane and high school basketball and wrestling. All were fodder for Hastings and his Kodak box cameras.
“He liked to get people into them if he could,” Smarro said.
Smarro combed through Hastings’ photo albums and copies of the rail magazines in which his work regularly appeared to put together the show, which was made possible by both a grant from the town of Bradford and a bequest from the late Phyllis Lavelle, a former member of the historical society.
“His first venture into community photography was the day after the 1938 hurricane. He and his brother John went around taking pictures of the damage,” said Larry Coffin, museum curator of the historical society. The black-and-white snapshots show downed trees on Bradford’s Main Street.
But it was trains that most fascinated Hastings.
It ran in the family: His father, who was a customs officer on the Canadian Pacific Railway in Vermont, regularly took his two sons to watch trains traveling through Bradford. In an essay that appeared in Trains magazine near the end of his life, Hastings wrote about being able to see the Boston and Maine steaming south across the Waits River Valley, and listening to the “banshee scream” of the Red Wing passenger train on its run between Montreal and Boston.
As a young man, Hastings was given and also bought Kodak box cameras, which he carried with him everywhere. They yielded crisp images of the trains and the people who worked on and for them. He took pictures not only of passenger trains but also freight and milk trains.
As Hastings matured, so did his technique and style.
Not content to shoot only from the sidelines as trains rolled through, he deployed cinematic camera angles: atop a train, bird’s eye views from bridges, overpasses or rocky ledges, panoramic shots, dusk and night views. Most of all, he gloried in the voluminous white or black clouds of steam the trains emitted as they roared through relatively undeveloped stretches of the American landscape, and chugged into small town depots.
“There was something magical about the steam engines. They were like a live thing,” Coffin said. The iron horse, indeed.
Hastings had wanted to become a train engineer. Ironically, given his later passion for photography, his eyesight was deemed too weak to qualify for the job. He served in the Army during World War II, and after the war studied medicine and photography at Tufts, Fordham and New York universities. He earned a medical degree from the University of Vermont in 1950. He then re-enlisted in the Army and as part of his medical training worked at VA hospitals in New York, Maryland, Texas and Washington. In 1959, he was certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.
He and his wife, Marian, and their five children then moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he established a psychiatric practice.
His archive of photos includes numerous shots of trains in the middle of the country, and he also was chairman of the Mid-Continent Railway Historical Society, in Wisconsin. He documented the so-called Golden Age of rail and the transition from steam power to diesel, as well as the dying away of rail as a dominant form of transportation. In 1985, the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society awarded Hastings its annual photography award in recognition of his achievements.
Almost nothing got in the way of his photography, Coffin said.
Family lore has it, Coffin added, that Hastings would drive at high speed if he were chasing down a train to take a picture. It didn’t matter who was with him in the car. “The children!” his wife would cry. “They’ll be all right,” he would reply.
The Hastings children live on the West Coast, Coffin said. But a niece in the Barre area and another from Buffalo have visited the museum in recent weeks, Coffin said.
After Hastings’ death his family donated his massive archive (consisting of some 46,000 black-and-white negatives, 4,000 prints, and 32,000 35mm color slides) to the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.
Bradford’s two former train depots still stand; one now serves as an office for a veterinary medicine practice, and the other is at Piermont Crossing. Weeds have grown into the slats between the railroad ties. The train doesn’t stop here anymore. But it’s possible to look north along the curving rail lines and imagine Hastings, camera in hand, waiting for the next Boston and Maine to roll through.
The Bradford Historical Society will hold a reception for “Through His Lens” at its museum on Sept. 12 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. The historical society is on the third floor of the Bradford Academy building at 172 North Main St. Hours are Fridays from 10 a.m. to noon, or by appointment. For information and to contact the historical society, go to facebook.com/BradfordHistoricalSociety.
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.
Correction
There are two former railroad stations in Bradford, Vt.: one in the village and the other at Piermont Crossing near FarmWay. In addition, Larry Coffin is the museum curator of the Bradford Historical Society while Meroa Benjamin is president. An earlier version of this story was incorrect on these points