Plowden, David. A Time of Trains by David Plowden.

W.W. Norton, 1987. 1st edition. One of numerous photo books by David Plowden, this one features black-and-white photographs of steam trains, railway stations, and related scenes depicting the end of the steam train era, presumably in the 1950s as the photos are undated. Ex-library with usual evidence, otherwise very good in protected dust jacket without spine labels.  

David Plowden (1932–2026) was an American photographer, author, and educator celebrated as a visual chronicler of America's vanishing industrial landscape, steam locomotives, small towns, and agrarian infrastructure. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, and educated at Yale University—where he studied economics and took a course under Minor White—Plowden worked briefly for the Great Northern Railway before studying photography under Minor White and Nathan Lyons and assisting O. Winston Link in New York. Over a career spanning more than six decades, he crisscrossed the United States with large-format and medium-format cameras, producing meticulous, starkly beautiful black-and-white studies of steam trains, steel mills, grain elevators, iron bridges, and main street communities before they succumbed to modernization and decay. Author of over twenty monographs—including Farewell to Steam (1966), Bridges: The Spans of North America (1974), and Vanishing Point (2007)—Plowden complemented his field work with decades of teaching, serving as a professor at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology and Grand Valley State University.Recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and major exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, and the Grohmann Museum, Plowden established an indispensable archive of mid-century American material culture, preserved today in his extensive archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale.

A Time of Trains (published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1987) is a seminal 160-page photographic monograph by acclaimed documentary photographer and author David Plowden. Featuring over 130 rich duotone plates alongside ten pages of evocative prose, the volume functions as a sweeping, elegiac retrospective documenting the final years of the steam railroading era in North America before the widespread transition to diesel power.

Core Content & Visual Framework

1. The Twilight of Steam Technology

The book focuses heavily on the late 1950s, a critical transitional period in American industrial history. The visual narrative captures the raw, mechanical majesty of massive steam locomotives, focusing on the textures of iron, smoke, and steel. Rather than presenting sterile equipment catalogs, the compositions emphasize the sheer power, kinetic energy, and physical presence of these vanishing machines, transforming heavy industry into a subject of deep romance and artistic reflection.

2. The Landscape of the Railroad Network

Beyond the engines themselves, the publication provides a comprehensive visual survey of the expansive infrastructure that supported the rail network. The plates chronicle the vast, quiet landscapes surrounding the tracks, including small-town passenger stations, towering wooden grain elevators, complex right-of-way junctions, and urban roundhouses. These environments are framed as a distinct, unified architecture of mid-century American life that was shifting alongside the technology itself.

3. Human Geography and Industrial Archeology

A vital element of the volume is its attention to the people who kept the network running. The imagery captures candid portraits and environmental studies of the engineers, firemen, track workers, and station agents whose lives and labor were intimately intertwined with the steam engine. The accompanying text provides essential narrative depth, combining autobiographical recollections of a lifelong obsession with trains with historical analysis of how the railroad reshaped the economy, geography, and cultural identity of the continent.

A Time of Trains stands as a masterpiece of American industrial archeology and documentary arts. Drawing on the ability to capture the "vanishing point" of the built environment, the monograph preserves a definitive, museum-grade visual record of a foundational technological era, immortalizing the sights, scale, and atmosphere of a transient chapter in transportation history.