The Art of Dining on Rails: Presented by Jay W. Christopher & Anne Lapinski

Tuesday, February 23, 2021
7:00-8:00 P.M. (U.S. Central), on Cisco Webex

Now Available on YouTube

The Christopher Transportation Museum is home to Jay Christopher’s personal collection of airline, shipline, railroad, and airship artifacts that preserve the history of transportation dining starting in the late 1800s. The dining artifacts along with the accompanying collections tell a broad story of early travel and preserve significant history in their aesthetic design and fabrication.

The railroad collection at the Christopher Transportation Museum is the museum’s first and largest collection. The railroad collection presents a sweeping narrative that touches on many aspects of early railroading in the United States and abroad. The museum’s collection allows visitors to get a first-hand look at what it was like to work, travel, and, most importantly to eat aboard these illustrious trains.

The Christopher Transportation Museum and the Center for Railroad Photography & Art invites you to join us as we explore the museum’s collection in the upcoming presentation, “The Art of Dining on Rails.”

Jay W. Christopher, Historical Collector, The Christopher Transportation Museum

Anne Lapinski, Collection Curator and Manager, The Christopher Transportation Museum

This event is free.

View of the railroad dining car collection at the Jay W. Christopher Transportation Museum. Photograph by Anne Lapinski.

The Iron Road to the Deep North: Japanese Railways of Hokkaido, Then and Now

Wednesday, January 6, 2021
7:00-8:00 P.M. (U.S. Central), on Cisco Webex

Now Available on YouTube

Victor Hand traveled to Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, in 1966 and 1971 in search of steam locomotives.

Scott Lothes lived in Hokkaido from 2005 to 2007 where he taught English and rode trains all over the island. His presentation uses Hand’s photography, which is now part of the Center’s collection, as well as Lothes’s more recent views, to explore Hokkaido and its fascinating railways. The tracks cling to rugged coastlines, climb spectacular mountains, and have undergone many changes in the decades between Hand’s and Lothes’s visits.

Lothes, President and Executive Director of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, joined the Center’s staff in 2008. He is a regular contributor to Trains, Railfan and Railroad, and other railroad publications, with more than fifty bylined articles and some 500 photographs in print.

This event is free.

A Japanese National Railways D52 locomotive steams south with a freight train at Onuma, Hokkaido, in January 1971 beneath snow-covered Komagatake. Photograph by Victor Hand, Hand-JNR-C18-01.

A JR Hokkaido “Super Hokuto” Limited Express train rolls along Uchiura (“Volcano”) Bay near Date, Hokkaido, in June 2007 with Komagatake in the background at left. Photograph by Scott Lothes.

Three-Of-A-Kind : 2021 John E. Gruber Creative Photography Awards Program

Theme: Three-Of-A-Kind

The 2021 John E. Gruber Creative Photography Awards Program asks photographers to submit a set of three digital images that thematically tell a story capturing a unique aspect of railroading. These three images will be judged as a single submission. Photographers may submit up to two sets of three images.

There are no time frame limitations, digital manipulation of the images is permitted but not required, color and black & white images are acceptable as determined by the artist.

Theme introduction: December 1, 2020
Submission deadline: May 1, 2021
Awards notification: August 1, 2021

Learn more here

Keep in touch with CRP&A postcards

In conjunction with an article in Railroad Heritage 2021:1 by Den Adler, “The Rise and Fall of the Railroad Postcard,” the Center has published a set of six postcards with images from our collections. In this time of limited contact and so much electronic communication, we want to encourage physical, tangible correspondence. Our postcards are printed on 130-pound linen cover stock, and they feature the work of photographers Katherine Botkin, William Botkin, Victor Hand, Ronald Hill, Thomas McIlwraith, and James Shaughnessy.

$5 per set of six cards, which includes domestic postage

Wallace W. Abbey: A Life in Railroad Photography, presented by Kevin Keefe and Scott Lothes

Wednesday, December 16, 2020
7:00-8:00 P.M. (U.S. Central), on Cisco Webex

Now Available on YouTube

Kevin Keefe and Scott Lothes, co-writers and editors of the publication Wallace W. Abbey: A Life in Railroad Photography (Indiana University Press, 2018) come together to celebrate the life and work of a man who devoted a fifty-year career to the railroad photography community. Keefe and Lothes will present highlights from the book, which drew from Abbey’s collection of 25,000 black-and-white negatives held by the Center.

The presentation will chart Abbey’s career documenting the railroad industry. Beginning in the 1940s, Abbey masterfully combined journalistic and artistic vision to transform everyday moments in transportation into magical photographs. A photographer, journalist, historian, and railroad industry executive, he helped people from many different backgrounds understand and appreciate what was often taken for granted: a world of locomotives, passenger trains, big-city terminals, small-town depots, and railroaders. During his lifetime he witnessed and photographed sweeping changes in the railroad industry from the steam era to the era of diesel locomotives and electronic communication.

Kevin Keefe is the former vice-president-editorial for Kalmbach Publishing Co. He served as editor of Trains from 1992 to 2000. As a student at Michigan State, he worked on Pere Marquette steam locomotive no. 1225, and later authored a book about it.

Scott Lothes, President and Executive Director of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, joined the Center’s staff in 2008. He is a regular contributor to Trains, Railfan and Railroad, and other railroad publications, with more than fifty bylined articles and some 500 photographs in print.

This event is free.

On a rainy summer day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1952, two boys watch as the Chicago & North Western’s westbound Twin Cities 400 makes its stop at the city’s lakefront depot, near the shore of Lake Michigan. Abbey-03-049-002.