Victor Hand

 Victor Hand, transportation consultant and prolific railroad photographer, is amongst the most well-travelled creators represented in the CRP&A’s collections. In sixty years of railroad photography, he has captured rail operations on all six inhabited continents, creating a visual archive of 46,000-plus negatives shot in over 50 counties, nearly all of the US. States and Canadian provinces. His detailed notes prove that he has traveled more than two million miles in the process.

Born in 1942, Hand grew up in New York City. His first memory of photographing trains occurred in 1955, when he convinced his mother to take him and a friend to Port Jervis, New York, aboard the Erie Limited. His interest in photography was further peaked when, the following year, his family traveled to Europe, and Hand brought a camera along for the trip. These early experiences likely cemented Hand’s love of photography as well as international travel.

After law school and a few short stints in train service, Hand entered Penn Central’s management training program in 1969. It was the beginning of a long, successful, and highly influential career in railroad management and consulting—one that included work on such watersheds as the creation of Conrail. During his career, Hand also did consulting work for Amtrak as well as several major bankruptcies including the Milwaukee Road and the Rock Island, and he performed digital traffic modeling in the early days of computers. He only began to transition away from this work in the 1990’s–when most of Hand’s consulting business began shifting overseas. One of Hand’s last big assignments was as a consultant for Norfolk Southern during its joint acquisition of Conrail with CSX, a fitting capstone considering one of Hand’s first major projects was the creation Conrail.

 Along the way, he high railed (driving a truck with special wheels on railroad track) thousands of miles of the North American rail network, keeping one notebook for professional observations and another for recording potential photography locations. As Hand spent most of his working life around the Washington D.C. area, his North American photography is especially strong in the Northeast. However, he also traveled widely and endeavored to obtain good action photographs of most of the continent’s iconic locations. Images of Milwaukee Road, Santa Fe, and Southern Pacific as well the New York Central, Pennsylvania Railroad, and Erie Lackawanna appear throughout the collection.

A lover of steam locomotives, Hand also frequently traveled domestically for mainline steam excursions. And while he never completely got over the transition to diesel, Hand learned to make peace with steam’s successors–he photographed diesel and electric railroading as well as steam excursions. According to Hand, the trick to making diesel subjects look as compelling as steam was photographing them in interesting locations. While his early steam photography emphasized up-close, dramatic views of locomotives working hard, he shifted to focusing more on capturing a sense of place in his diesel pictures. It was in these instances that Hand’s second notebook came in particularly handy.

Hand’s fascination with steam also led to the photography for which he’s the most well known: his international work. Beginning in the 1960s, a time when relatively few Americans were traveling abroad, Hand chased steam to Mexico, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and then to Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Africa, and South America.  Along the way, he brought international steam locomotives to the pages of Trains in ways its readers had never seen before. Editor David P. Morgan championed Hand’s work and helped cement his photographic reputation. It was Hand’s deep love of American steam that forced him to stay ahead of the curve. As he explained to Morgan in a July 1968 article, “The photographing of foreign power I have been doing is a substitute for the American engines which I was born too late to see. I would trade all the Garratts in South Africa for one view of a New York Central Hudson at speed on the main line.”

Still regularly shooting rail subjects, Hand continues to create with his preferred tools of the trade: black-and-white film (sometimes color–he usually carries a sheet negative or two) and one of his trademark 4×5 Speed Graphic cameras. Hand has also always done his own darkroom work. When asked why he doesn’t want to make the switch to digital, Hand says, “First, I was fully invested in all the equipment I needed fifty years ago, including a lot that’s now obsolete. Secondly, I’d be an instant amateur. It took me fifty years to figure out what I’m doing. Fine, I understand digital’s great, you can do all kinds of wonderful stuff, but that’s not what I’m going to do. I’ll just stay doing what I’ve been doing.”