The blue stamp meant great train pictures

I was in the Classic Trains library recently, thumbing through black-and-white prints, when an old familiar name popped into view on the back of a first-rate action photo of Boston & Albany steam. Seen here, it shows a pair of B&A A-1c “sport model” 2-8-4s, rumbling through West Warren, Mass., with the 5,000 tons of eastbound train BA-6. 

The photo is directly credited to Ray E. Tobey, a name unfamiliar to me. What was not unfamiliar was the big blue stamp next to it: Rail Photo Service, 305-307 Sherman Building, 93 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston 15, Mass., U.S.A.

Once upon a time, the Rail Photo Service was a huge force in railroad publishing. Not a company or a business in the usual sense, it was a sort of co-op of railroad photographers, strung out all across the country and apparently pledging their work to the organization. The man in charge was H. W. Pontin. He made quite a name for himself over several decades.  

Pontin is in the great tradition of professional railroaders who loved their job so much they decided to take a camera along. Born in England in 1893, he moved to the U.S. as a child and years later hired on with New York Central’s Boston & Albany subsidiary. He was 20. There he would stay for 45 years, until retirement in 1958, most of those years spent on the right-hand side of the cab, running steam through Massachusetts.

It didn’t take long for Pontin to gain a reputation as an unusually talented photographer, especially in an era dominated by roster shooters. He learned how to convey action, and although it was solidly in the “wedgie” tradition, these were Grade A wedgies. None other than Lucius Beebe endorsed him, writing in his 1938 book High Iron that Pontin was “among the ranking photographers.”

My notes indicate that Pontin organized RPS in 1917, intending it to be a clearing-house for negatives and prints and to serve as an all-purpose “railroad photography institute” for newcomers. Pontin also was widely known around Boston — he helped found the Railroad Enthusiasts there in 1934.

Apparently Pontin’s initial dream was to set up RPS as a going business, but contemporaries recall that it was more like a club — or a one-man show. In its heyday, the RPS letterhead listed a “Don Ramsey” as the lab technician, but associates later identified Ramsey as really Pontin himself.

But that didn’t keep Pontin from employing all the trappings of what appeared to be a bona fide picture syndicate, one that from a distance looked as legit as Wide World Photos. The photographers were usually listed as “Staff,” as if on a payroll. On the back of every print was the standard blue stamp, with a copyright warning indicating the photograph was the property of the RPS — probably a stretch if no money ever changed hands. 

The gimmick worked, though. Pontin managed to enlist many of the leading figures of early railroad photography, and their names and the RPS designation made it into credit lines on the pages of countless railroad books and magazines. One of Pontin’s more famous recruits was Don Wood.  

Another of Pontin’s go-to guys in the late 1940s was Eugene Huddleston, whose devotion to the Chesapeake & Ohio led not only to a huge output of his own C&O photographs, but also to the definitive book C&O Power, co-authored with Al Staufer and Philip Shuster and published in 1965. Gene later had a long career as a professor at Michigan State. His association with Pontin changed his life.

“When I was a teen in Russell, Kentucky, Pontin became a sort of mentor,” Gene told me in 1991. “I attended their convention in Chicago, concurrent with the Railroad Fair in the summer of 1948 or ’49, and there I met Warren Fancher, Frank MacKinlay, Stanwood Bolton, Ben Cutler, and other leaders of the group. It was really something.”

When it came time to pull photos for this edition of Mileposts, I had to have something by Gene, and I found a dandy. It depicts C&O J-3-A 4-8-4 No. 613 on a coal train departing Ashland, Ky., probably taken in 1955 when the railroad put several 4-8-4s back in service during a surge in export coal traffic.

There’s more going on here than just a standard three-quarter action shot. Gene wanted his image to convey the bittersweet story of a fall from grace, of how C&O’s superb 4-8-4s had been demoted from passenger service, their chrome cylinder covers, gleaming lightweight roads, and disc drivers relegated to the most mundane of duties.

Occasionally, RPS photographers went beyond the usual coming-at-you fare, as witness this stirring image of a Northern Pacific 2-8-8-4 Yellowstone in helper service, digging in as it pushes an eastbound manifest up Bozeman Hill. “Flanges bite and squeal around the sharp curves” captioned the photographer, Frank MacKinlay.

My research indicated the Rail Photo Service managed to last into the 1960s, although it rapidly lost its momentum after steam passed and the hobby became dominated by color slides. Also, a new generation of photographers became savvy at marketing their work directly to editors. Eventually, the RPS negative collection was broken up and passed along to various organizations. 

H. W. Pontin died December 27, 1973, in Waterville, Maine, at the age of 80, having given up railroad photography at an earlier age. But his legacy is secure. For several decades, the blue imprimatur of the Rail Photo Service was synonymous with great railroad photography.