LwS EXTRA: William A. Steventon & the Railroad Record Club, Part 1
In this episode of LwS EXTRA, we begin our look at the life and legacy of William A. Steventon and the Railroad Record Club. The RRC was a brilliant and very innovative way for Steventon to share the many sound recordings he made in addition to those from other railfans who also started making recordings of trains from the mid 1950s onward. The introduction of the “consumer model” portable tape recorder made it possible for dozens of “Railroad Sound Audio Recording Engineers” to hit the road and set up their gear near railroad tracks all over the country.
In this, the first part in the series, you’ll be introduced to Steventon and hear the first recordings he made beginning in 1953. The very FIRST recording he made was at Riverdale, Maryland in March 1953. In order to keep the narrative for the podcast episode to a minimum, I purposely omitted much of the technical details about each of the recordings on those early dates. Thanks to Kenneth Gear, who compiled an extensive discography of Steventon’s output, the background information about each recording session is available.
When Steventon headed out to make his first recordings, he was naturally apprehensive about where and how he was going to do it. His Magnecord PT-6 was a beast and he may have been a tad nervous about going out alone. Luckily, his friend William Bateman accompanied him on those first sessions.
He stayed close to home in Washington, D. C. while he learned the craft of railroad field recording. Throughout the summer he honed his skills recording the trains of the B&O and the trolleys of Capital Transit. By August, he was ready to attempt an excursion further away from home. He made a trip to Virginia to record the steam powered tourist railroad Shenandoah Central and then to Altoona and Johnstown, Pennsylvania for audio of the Altoona & Logan Valley and Johnstown Traction streetcars.
In December he made his first extensive recording trip, it took him from Washington, D. C. to St. Louis, Missouri. Although this trip was also for family visits, he made many stops along the way to make tape recordings of trains.
The second half of this trip included taking his father to Mount Carmel and Cairo, Illinois where they both had once lived. The New York Central recordings he made here comprise most of RRC-20. He spent the better part of December 1953 in pursuit of railroad audio and the coming of the new year did not cool his passion. In January 1954, he made at least two recording trips to Fredrick, Maryland to preserve the sounds of the Potomac Edison's ex-Hagerstown & Fredrick interurban cars as well as a two day trip to Baltimore to capture the city's Streetcars on tape.
You will hear many more of Steventon’s recordings in the next episode of LwS EXTRA.
Special thanks to Kenneth Gear for his assistance in producing this episode. Ken had the good fortune to locate and preserve Steventon’s entire estate of recordings, photographs, and papers; that in itself is an incredible story. Additionally, Ken wrote a very thorough biography about William A Steventon and the Railroad Record Club… including complete discography information about each RRC release and liner notes.
To learn much more information about William A. Steventon and to purchase the CDs that contain the original Railroad Record Club recordings, please visit:
The Railroad Record Club Facebook Page
The Trolley Dodger Online Store
The images above show William Steventon’s father, Seth, when he served as an engineer for the New York Central. The picture in the upper right corner shows Seth sitting in the cab of a Shenandoah Central engine while he and William were visiting the Shenandoah Central Railroad in August of 1953. The SC RR was a narrow gauge tourist line built on a railfan's large estate in Virginia. It only operated for a few years before most of the track was washed away by a hurricane.
The photo in the lower left shows New York Central 2-8-0 No. 1169 at Steventon's boyhood home of Cairo, Illinois in December of 1948. Seth is the engineer. The long lumber shed to the right of the locomotive is one that Steventon would record from because of the sound a steam locomotive made while passing the structure. To the best of my ability, the inscription on the back of the photo reads “2-12-48. Resting at noon hour - She just had a few belts of coal - is now smoking about it. Eng. 1169 - Cairo, Ill. Big 4 - (NYC R R) S. E. Steventon, Engine.”
Potomac Edison/Hagerstown & Frederick box motor locomotive No. 5 as heard in one of the recordings featured in this episode On May 24, 1953 Steventon took his recorder aboard box motor No.5 as it made a run from Frederick, Maryland. H&F No. 5 was built of wood construction by the railway's own shop in 1920 and served in freight service until it's retirement in 1955. This locomotive survives today and is on display in Thurmont, Maryland.
To learn more about the Hagerstown & Frederick Railway, visit this page from the National Capitol Trolley Museum
The two images above show William Steventon (second from the left in the light-colored shirt) with friends waiting to record and photograph the Hagerstown & Frederick Railroad new Bethel, MD on January 3, 1954.
You’ll learn more about Steventon’s method of recording and duplicating his recordings for sale through the Railroad Record Club in Part 2 of the story. I mention in this episode that Steventon would take the tape recordings he made in the field and copy them to Audiodisc record blanks using the portable record cutter he purchased early in the life of the RRC. While it was a pretty good idea to do this simply for the fact that several of his original master tapes were either lost or destroyed and the records would serve as backups, Steventon’s main reason for cutting records was because most people didn’t own a reel-to-reel tape deck… but they DID own a phonograph. In the early 1950s, magnetic tape as a consumer-ready product was very new. If Steventon wanted to give or sell his recordings, they would have to be on phonograph records.
At the time Steventon was making these records, the standard size was 10” and they could only hold about 3:30 to just under 5:00 of sound. The discs were made of aluminum with a layer of acetate over it. Oh… they also played at 78rpm.
The images above show a selection of recordings Steventon made available very early in his career. Note the labeling on the record in the third image; “B&O RR - 1st tape recording.” You will hear this actual record in the episode.
Above are images of a few of Steventon’s completed reels. While most were small 3” reels, he recorded much longer sequences on the standard 7” reels. The middle image shows the case/label for the recording of box engine #5 featured in this episode.
The B&O trains Steventon recorded during his very first session were the “Marylander” and the “Cleveland Night Express"“. Both trains may have been pulled by the diesels represented in these shots.
Steventon captured two Pennsylvania Railroad F-7 engines heading downgrade with a heavy freight train at Horseshoe Curve near Altoona, PA. on November 20, 1954
The images shown in the top row, courtesy of Google Earth, show the passenger station at Riverdale, MD as it looks today. Queensbury Road crosses the tracks and is where Steventon set up his tape recorder to capture B&O trains in order to get the engines whistling for the grade crossing and the bell of the crossing gates.
The bottom two images showing an RDC crossing Queensbury Road, and the Riverdale Station, are courtesy of the B&O Washington Branch page located at trainweb.net.
Although I was never a fan of ANY electric locomotive, Pennsylvania’s GG1 is where I make my exception. Are they the most stunning engine (of any motive power) ever built? Probably not. But Raymond Lawrey designed something really special. In 1934, Lowrey unveiled the GG1 to the Pennsylvania Railroad and it wound up being an incredible work-horse up until 1983, when the last one was retired. The GG1 was capable of pulling huge 25-car passenger trains at 100mph all day, every day. As you will hear in William Steventon’s recordings, the GG1 was also capable of hauling long freight trains at incredible speeds. Nothing fazed this industrial masterpiece.
The top left picture shows GG1 4870 dressed in Penn Central markings, while the middle photo shows GG1 4884 on a passenger run. These are the same engines heard in Steventon’s recording. The photo on the right shows a GG1 in Lanham, Maryland. (Picture courtesy of RailPictures.net)
William A. Steventon (1921 - 1993)
END (for now)
