NONFICTION - Jan. 21, 1996

THE LAST STEAM RAILROAD IN AMERICA photographs by O. Winston Link, text by Thomas H. Garver. (Harry N. Abrams Inc.: 144 pp.; $49.50). That railroad, as those who made Link’s acquaintance through his breakthrough 1987 book, “Steam, Steel & Stars” will remember, was Virginia’s Norfolk & Western. Between 1955 and 1959, Link used a 4-by-5 Graphic View camera to take more than 2,200 mostly nighttime photographs along the line’s 2,500 miles of track, “a labor,” curator Garver accurately notes, “of vision, love and obsession.” A meticulous planner who used synchronized flash to carefully highlight the locomotives, train buff Link created after-dark shots of unparalleled spookiness and power, pictures that made these enormous steam engines look both menacing and familiar. The current book is in the nature of a follow-up project, including night shots that didn’t make it into the first collection as well as a sunlit photo essay Link did on the Norfolk & Western’s daytime-only Abingdon branch. And it includes Link’s first published color photos, the most interesting of which, not surprisingly, are the two he took at night.