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Highlights

Photography Awards

Photo by Olaf Haensch, 2008 winner

As a part of its commitment to excellence, the Center has established annual national awards for outstanding contributions to railroad imagery. The next deadline is March 10, 2009. See the 2008 winners.

Directors and Officers

John Gruber
Madison, Wisconsin

Gruber is founder of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art and editor of its journal, Railroad Heritage. He has been a free-lance railroad photographer since 1960, and received a railroad history award from the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society in 1994 for lifetime achievement in photography. He is contributing editor to Classic Trains, and co-author of Caboose (2001), Travel by Train, the American Railroad Poster (2002), Railway Photography (2003), and Milwaukee Road's Hiawathas (2006). He edited Vintage Rails magazine from 1995 to 1999.

Mark W. Hemphill
Portland, Oregon

Hemphill, an accomplished railway photographer and author, is senior rail project manager with HDR, Inc., in its Portland, Oregon, office. He was the Senior Consultant for Railways to the U.S. State Department's Iraq Reconstruction Management Office in Baghdad, Iraq, for 19 months until late August 2006. He edited Trains magazine from September 2000 to June 2004, managed heavy construction in Alaska, operated a locomotive maintenance company with clients throughout the West, and dispatched trains for the Kansas City Southern Railway. He earned an M.A. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993.

Nona Hill
Waunakee, Wisconsin

Nona Hill has been a rail enthusiast her entire life, having grown up next to the Milwaukee-Watertown-Madison line in Wisconsin. She and Clark Johnson, her husband, operate High Iron Travel, operator of the Caritas, the most widely traveled private car in America. Clark is on the board of directors of Iowa Pacific Holdings, which operates several short lines in the west, and the American Association of Private Railroad Car Owners. He is a former science adviser to the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Nona is treasurer of Pro-Rail, a Madison-based passenger advocacy group, and vice-president of WISARP, the Wisconsin chapter of the National Association of Railroad Passengers.

David Kahler
Flat Rock, North Carolina

Kahler has practiced architecture for more than 30 years and has been recognized by his peers as a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. After serving as the president of Kahler Slater Architects, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for nearly three decades, Mr. Kahler founded DK Consulting in 2001 and serves as president and design adviser. Many projects for which he has been the design principal have won awards, including the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin State Capitol Restoration, the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, and the Pettit National Ice Center. The Milwaukee Landmark Lighting project received a national urban design award from the American Institute of Architects.

Albert O. Louer
Williamsburg, Virginia

A native of Highland Park, Illinois, the Chicago & North Western nurtured Louer's interest in transportation and railroads. He was graduated from Lake Forest Academy and the College of William and Mary with a concentration in history. He started at Colonial Williamsburg in 1968, moving to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He returned to Colonial Williamsburg in 1982 as Director of Public Relations. In 1991, he moved into fundraising, first as Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations and now as Senior Director for Major Gifts. His interests and collections are in how the railroads developed marketing techniques and advanced the art and science of promotion.

Arthur H. Miller
Lake Forest, Illinois

Miller has been archivist and librarian for special collections at the Donnelley and Lee Library, Lake Forest College, in Illinois, since 1994. Before coming to Lake Forest in 1972, he worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Miller is the author of the article on "Railroad" in American Icons: An Encyclopedia of the People Places, and things that Have Shaped Our Culture, ed. Dennis R. Hall and Susan Grove Hall (Greenwood, 2006), volume three, and he prepared chapter 18, "Trains and Railroading," in volume three of the Handbook of American Popular Culture (1988 and subsequent eds). His other publications include Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest, Architectural and Landscape Design, 1856-1940 by Kim Coventry, Daniel Meyer, and Arthur H. Miller (W. W. Norton, 2003) and three articles on Lake Forest estates in David Adler, Architect, the Elements of Style ed. Martha Thorne (Yale University Press and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2002).

Joel Skornicka
Madison, Wisconsin

Skornicka is a principal in Herndon, Mays & Skornicka, a consulting firm to executives and organizations, with offices in Layton, Maryland, and Madison, Wisconsin. He was mayor of Madison for two terms; chair of the Wisconsin Arts Board; and administrator at University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of California, Davis.

Joseph Swanson
Racine, Wisconsin

Swanson is president of Jos. Swanson & Co. (management consulting) and adjunct professor of finance at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

Michael Ross Valentine

Michael Ross Valentine is Vice-President and Co-Principal Valentine Robotics Inc. of Sterling Heights, Michigan. He also serves as adjunct faculty for robotics at several local colleges, and serves on the academic advisory board for Macomb Community College's M-TEC education facility. Valentine Robotics was founded in 1996, and specializes in robotics and automation system programming, training and integration. He previously worked for the BNSF Railway and UPS. Valentine lived and studied at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and is an avid photographer in the U.S. and abroad. He has written articles and had photos published in Trains, CTC Board, and foreign publications. He lives in the Detroit area with his wife Agnes from Austria, and their newly adopted daughter Maya Xia Shen Valentine from China.