O. Winston Link; Photographed Trains

O. Winston Link, a photographer who used his lens, elaborate lighting and a fertile imagination to capture the end of the steam era in American railroading, has died.

Link, 86, was found dead in his car Tuesday outside a train station in Katohah, a town near his home in New York state.

Although no cause of death was announced, it was known that Link had a history of heart trouble.

Link’s interest in railroads developed as a youth growing up in Brooklyn. Though that interest would be rekindled time and again over his life, it came to full bloom in the mid-1950s, when he stopped by a rail yard while on a commercial photography assignment in Virginia.

After seeing an old Norfolk and Western steam engine passenger train roll past, Link accepted an invitation from a railroad worker to wander around the train yard and visit the repair shop and refueling facilities.

“Inspecting the premises, he became aware of the traditional appurtenances of railroading,” Tim Hensley wrote in “Steam, Steel and Stars,” a collection of Link’s pictures published in 1987.

Link’s visit left him with an overwhelming desire to record the fading years of the steam locomotive.

“The train is as close to a human being as you can get,” Link once told a reporter. “It talks, it moves, it grunts and groans. And each engine has its own characteristics--its own sound and smell and sights.”

Over the next several years, Link used a large-format view camera to take 2,400 pictures, most of them at night, of Norfolk and Western’s coal and passenger trains. The railroad maintained the country’s last steam trains at a time when the era of rail travel had largely passed. The railroad retired its last steam engine in May 1960.

He preferred shooting at night, he said, because “you can’t control the sun.” By working at night with artificial light, “you can control the light and accent what you want,” he once told a reporter.

“Hot Shot Eastbound,” probably Link’s most famous photograph, was made in Iaeger, W.Va., in 1956. It shows a young couple seated in a convertible at a drive-in movie theater. They stare straight ahead at the image of an airplane on the movie screen while a steam-powered train rolls past on tracks next to the theater.

As with his interest in trains, Link was drawn to photography, a craft he learned from his father, as a youth in Brooklyn. He printed his pictures at home on an enlarger that he built himself.

Trained as a civil engineer, Link turned to photography when he could not get a job after graduating from what is now Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn.

Although he had no formal training in photography, Link found steady work as a commercial photographer working throughout his career for such companies as B.F. Goodrich, Alcoa Aluminum and Texaco.

While completing his train project, he also took nostalgic pictures of a disappearing rural culture: stoop-shouldered neighbors around a stove and children swimming at night beneath railroad tracks.

Noted for his technical expertise, Link used a synchronized flash system to capture high-contrast nighttime images of passing trains that involved hundreds of lightbulbs and miles of cable and wires, and a heavy, large-format camera 10 times the size of today’s hand-held cameras.

“Just mastering the hardware alone is a technical feat, but then to master it in such a way as to make it subtle and create the images he did--people can’t even fathom what it took to create those shots,” Mann said.

Although he took the pictures in the late 1950s, Link was not well known in the art world until the early 1980s. In addition to “Steam, Steel and Stars,” Link’s photographs are collected in the book “The Last Steam Railroad in America.”

“Perhaps in retrospect Link should be seen, not merely as one who depicted the last years of steam train activity on the Norfolk and Western railway, but also as one who documented the waning years of America’s age of innocence,” Carolyn Kinder Carr wrote in a commentary on Link’s work for an exhibition of his photographs at the Akron Art Museum in 1983.

“Although Link’s technical expertise commands admiration,” Carr added, “ultimately his photographs compel attention because of the manner in which he repeatedly transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.”

His personal life was as colorful as his photographic career. Link was married and divorced twice, and his second wife was convicted in 1996 of stealing 1,400 of his pictures with an estimated value of $1 million to $2 million. Conchita Mendoza Link remains in a New York prison, serving as much as 20 years. The pictures have not been found.

He was also the subject of a documentary “Trains That Pass in the Night,” a British production that was shown on public television and cable channels in the United States in the early 1990s.

Link is survived by a son from his first marriage and a grandchild.