This is a photograph by the great US railway photographer, O Winston Link. I’ve posted about him before…I love this photo; you get a sense of the scale of the machines, but also of how dirty and battered these locos were by the 1950s…and why the railways, eveywhere, had to modernise.
The night photography and the machines give Link’s images a powerful sense of 1950s US glamour…
Steam, Steel, and Stars (the night-time railway photographs of O Winston Link)
Here is a postcard of the railway station at Yunnan Fou. 
And here is an image of the station in 1910, with everyone waiting for the arrival of the first train.
I love the flags and bunting, and the slightly out-of-focus background. It reminds me of the famous Lumiere film…
Quite an unusual arragement of track at this station…health and safety considerations would usually distance the platform and junction. This looks like an accident wating to happen.
A very tidy station…no trains of passengers making a mess
Here is a lovely 1940s colour litho printed postcard fromt he US. I’m intrigued by these images and how the print quality and the subject matter combine…This is the Rock Island Rocket.
Thinking of Zephyrs, here is a picture of a bigger Zephyr…this time on the Santa Fe Railroad.
Here are some pictures of the Burlington Zephyr diesel unit from the 1940s. The train was exhibited at the World’s Fair and became a symbol of US modernisation…
One of the best graphic bits of the old BR was the Railfreight identity made up of heraldic elements. These had the great benefit of combining colour, scale and consistency across the various bits of industrial infrastructure relating to BRs freight operations.
