Previous Profiles
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Jennifer McDaniel, Florida. March 2011
Mike Johannessen and Justin Tognetti, California. September 2010
Nicholas D'Amato, Durham, North Carolina. June 2010
Lewis Ableidinger
Kensal, North Dakota. April 2010
Kyle Weismann-Yee
Portland, Oregon. January 2010
Walter Scriptunas II
Charleston, West Virginia. Nov. 2009
Frank Orona
Seeing Beyond the Locomotive
Colorado Fuel & Iron rails on the Norfolk Southern main line at Opelika, Alabama. Click on the photo to view its entry on railroadheritage.org.
Frank Orona, photo by Natalie Orona Baldwin
Family history and environment both play major roles in Frank Orona’s childhood love of trains. Family connected him to railroad equipment, and the heavy industry of the greater Birmingham, Alabama, area provided the railroad environment. As for photography, a chance encounter in college led him to it in 2006.
While Orona likes locomotives as much as any railroad photographer, what sets his work apart are his interests beyond locomotives—freight cars and their logos, and railroad equipment manufacturers and their products. “Where I grew up in Calera, Alabama, at the Abex plant where my dad worked, they made railroad wheels, and they would ship them out in boxcars,” Orona explained in a phone interview. “Seeing the big, bright colorful ones with giant logos on the sides always struck my imagination.”
Read more about Frank.
The Center for Railroad Photography & Art wishes to showcase the work of new, young, or relatively unknown railroad photographers. New profiles are published here on alternating months, and the selected photos are entered into the archive on railroadhertitage.org. Please contact us to submit your own work for consideration or to recommend someone.