James La Vake photographed passenger trains at their peak

Of the many first-rate photographers who became fascinated by postwar railroading, one of the best was James La Vake. An airline pilot by profession, he also had some experience as a photographer, and it showed: his photos in Trains magazine in the late 1940s and early ’50s are among the best featuring diesel-powered streamliners.

I’ve been encountering La Vake photos in the Trains and Classic Trains photo files for more than 30 years, including some during a recent photo search for this blog. I’m definitely an admirer. But I never really knew much about him, and several attempts to learn more were only mildly successful. La Vake died on Sept. 1, 1991, and lived a full life, but it was before the advent of the Internet, which offered only scattered information. Nevertheless, I think he deserves a higher profile.

I’m also interested in the link he represents between commercial aviation and railroading, especially among photographers. La Vake, it turns out, was among several airline pilots who are widely known in the railroad photography field. More on them in a moment.

Most of what I know about La Vake came in the November 1955 issue of Trains, the magazine’s 15^th anniversary, in which Editor David P. Morgan showcased several influential photographers. Some of the others included Philip R. Hasting, Richard Steinheimer, J. Parker Lamb, and Jim Shaughnessy. La Vake was in very good company.

From Morgan’s introduction I learned that La Vake had learned to fly airplanes in 1930; that he did some barnstorming, performed in some air shows, and taught beginners, and that in 1939 he hired on as a co-pilot with Eastern Airlines. He was promoted to first pilot in 1941, a status I assume obligated him to stay stateside during World War II, where domestic pilots were in short supply and valuable on the home front. La Vake and his family later settled in Manhasset, N.Y., on the north shore of Long Island, presumably to be close to Eastern’s operational center at New York’s LaGuardia airport.

He was already a practicing photographer, thanks in part to his mother. “(She) was quite a photographer in her day and she got me developing in a closet with MQ tubes and a red light bulb at about 10,” he told Morgan. La Vake later worked for a while as a photographer at the Minneapolis Tribune, then for a commercial photography firm in St. Paul, Minn.

James LaVake credited Trains with getting him interested in rail photography and thereafter he used a lot of his layover time to pursue his hobby. His specialty: shooting trains in and around big-city terminals, reflected in the images selected here from various visits to Minneapolis, Atlanta, Jacksonville, and New Orleans. I can imagine the Eastern captain checking into his crew hotel and, if it was a nice day, immediately renting a car or calling a taxi to get to the station. What really appeals to me about his photos is they invariably show passenger trains at their best, operating in those first few years after the massive streamline re-equipping that occurred after 1947, before the American passenger train began its long decline. La Vake’s trains always look great.

Although his was a frequent photo credit in Trains, La Vake only authored two stories in the magazine, near as I could find. One was a profile of the recently opened New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal, in the September 1954 issue (for which our Illinois Central E9 portrait here was shot), and also a short piece on Florida East Coast 4-6-2 No. 153 in December 1957. He also was the sole photographer for an extensive story about New York’s Sunnyside Yard, written in 1956 and reprised by Trains in its June 2003 issue.

La Vake’s work for Kalmbach wasn’t over when he stopped sending in railroad photographs. In 1973, late in his flying career, he authored a feature story for Kalmbach’s short-lived magazine Airliners International, a pet project of Trains Editor David P. Morgan; the magazine only lasted four issues. In that first issue was a photo of La Vake looking quite dashing in the left-hand seat of an Eastern L-1011 Tristar.

In keeping with his passion for commercial flight, Morgan had an affinity for pilots — his brother, Len Morgan, was a veteran Braniff captain — and he had leaned on La Vake to do something for his new magazine. “The Case of the Kangaroo Connie” was a fascinating history of Lockheed’s model 749A Constellations. Accompanying his story was a set of technical drawings by Kalmbach’s airbrush whiz, Allen J. Brewster.

As a pilot shooting trains, La Vake had distinguished company. The late Mallory Hope Ferrell, a longtime captain for Western and Delta airlines, had a virtual second career as a historian and photographer of the Colorado narrow gauge. Mel Finzer, now retired after a career at United Airlines (he ended his career flying the Boeing 777), has had numerous photo credits in Trains. Retired Air Canada Capt. Steve Bradley also has been featured in Trains, contributing a gorgeous Canadian Pacific cover photo for the November 1985 all-Canada issue (the magazine’s 45^th anniversary), and authoring a big story on Algoma Central in August 2000.

Leave it to Morgan to crystallize the shared interests of railroad and aviation people, from the first issue of AI: “We believe that the crossover between airline and railroad enthusiasms … is about as natural an affiliation as one could expect. Both the train and the airplane are mechanical inventions (in contrast with watercraft), both eclipsed their early competition with speed, both quickly won worldwide application, and both became interrelated. It follows, we think, that the professional in one field would respect his counterpart in the other.”

A quick postscript: of the many things I couldn’t determine about James La Vake, one was the fate of his negatives. I’d like to think they ended up in a reputable archive somewhere. If you have any information about that, please explain in the Comments section. Thanks.