ClassicTrainsMag.com 69Bjorklund was a bachelor until 1990. Through railroad
photography he developed a strong network of close friends in
Detroit and beyond. His travel partners included Jim Thomas,
Mike Schafer, Doug Harrop, Emery Gulash, Jeff Mast, Bob
Kessler, and Jim Koglin. Kessler, Koglin, and Bjorklund trav-
eled together so frequently that friends dubbed them, “The In-
famous Group of Three.”
Despite growing up with railroads, it was only after settling
into his career at Ford that Bjorklund dove into photographing
them. Both railroads and photography were undergoing tre-
mendous changes. Railroads were shifting away from a labor-
dominated business model to more capital-intensive, mecha-
nized operations. While the motive power transition from
steam to diesel epitomizes this shift, many other changes si-
multaneously swept through the industry. Photography, mean-
while, began moving away from black-and-white toward a full
embrace of color.
As with the changes on the railroads, many smaller shifts
were taking place in photography. Cameras were becoming
smaller, lighter, and faster as 35mm, single lens reflex systems
with interchangeable lenses came to dominate the market.
New lenses brought new perspectives, and railroad photogra-
phers particularly began to utilize telephoto lenses, bringing
variety to the “normal” field-of-view. Slide film, and particu-
larly Kodak’s Kodachrome, rendered the world in full color
that suited the diesel era well as railroads abandoned the stan-
dard black paint of steam locomotives and developed more
colorful schemes.
Yet color slide film came with drawbacks, particularly slow
speed and narrow exposure latitude. Sunny days and precise
exposures (most easily attained with predictable conditions)
became more important than ever for action railroad photog-
raphy. Commercial labs processed the film and sent back
mounted slides. These became the norm for the “finished”
railroad photograph, rather than prints made by hand in per-
sonal darkrooms.
This was the world that John Bjorklund entered when he
began photographing in the late 1960s. He quickly mastered
the “Kodachrome aesthetic” of direct sunlight at a low angle,
and he also learned how to get the most out of his film and
equipment in all conditions. He regularly switched between
normal and telephoto lenses, and he had a knack for capturing
dramatic silhouette and glint shots at sunrise and sunset.
The railroads of the era still included a significant human
presence at signal towers and stations all over the countryside.
Bjorklund frequently included railroaders and their infra-A BN freight passes a Milwaukee train near Iris, Mont, on July 10, 1979. Bjorklund commissioned a painting by artist Larry Fisher based on
this photo, but from an earlier time. It features MILW’s Olympian Hiawatha with a box-cab electric overtaking an NP 4-6-6-4 on a freight.