This rare photography collection captures the last steam train on the Virginia Creeper rail line. Of the Abingdon Branch, photographer O. Winston Link said, “At times the locomotives are almost incidental to the picture. They add to the rural scenery: streams, little bridges and country roads, trees, mountains, cows. They would come by then be gone, leaving behind just a little whiff of coal smoke.”

In 2002, the William King Museum of Art developed a collection of O. Winston Link photographs focused on the Norfolk and Western project and the last days of steam operation on the N&W Railway in the late 1950s. In this collection, the photographer captured more than trains and rail operations on the branch that ran from Abingdon to West Jefferson, N.C. These images taken by O. Winston Link are vignettes into the history and sociology of our region.

This exhibit is a partnership between the William King Museum of Art and the Town of Abingdon. It is located at the head of the Creeper Trail at Abingdon’s tourism annex, the Findlay House, 300 Green Spring Road, Abingdon, Va.

To learn more about O. Winston Link and his career as a photographer, visit roanokehistory.org.

EXHIBIT SPONSORS

Norfolk Southern Railroad

Private Contributions