Alumni

STUDENT | EXTRA CREDIT

Back On Track
Railfan Sayre Kos ’07 transfers to Lake Forest College after attending a railroad photography conference on campus.

By Lindsay Beller

Kos's hat sports the emblem of the Louisville & Indiana Railroad, where he first met Kathi Kube of Trains magazine. She would eventually hire him as the magazine's first intern. (Photo by Lindsay Beller)

In August 2004, Kathi Kube was riding on the Louisville & Indiana Railroad on assignment for Trains magazine when she spotted some interesting scenery out of the window. “There were a couple of crazy guys chasing the train with cameras,” recalls Kube, the magazine’s managing editor. She quickly whipped out a business card and a pen, and threw both out the window.

One of those crazy guys was Sayre Kos ’07, a talented photographer and train enthusiast, or “railfan,” who has seen more than a dozen of his pictures and articles published in various train magazines since high school. Kos’s good eye, writing ability, industry knowledge, and willingness to “get up and off the couch to race around the country shooting trains” impressed Kube, who hired him in January as the first intern in the magazine’s history.

As his passion for trains took Kos on adventures around the country, it also landed him at Lake Forest College in March 2005 for the third annual conference of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art, a Madison, Wisconsin-based nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving railroad images.

At the conference, which has been held at Lake Forest since its inception in 2003, Kos met Arthur Miller, archivist and librarian for special collections. Miller convinced Kos to help him catalogue over 5,000 railroad photographs donated to the archives by Arthur D. Dubin ASTP ’47. Once Kos learned that he could pursue an Independent Scholar degree in creative writing and editing, a major that he hopes will move him closer to his goal of becoming an editor at Trains, he applied for admission and became one of the 90 students who transferred to the College during the 2005-06 school year.

But his life wasn’t always on track. Kos developed an interest in trains developed as a teenager growing up in the nearby suburb of Mundelein, where he would take pictures of the Wisconsin Central as it charged through downtown. In high school, Kos entered and won train magazine photo competitions but felt adrift after enrolling in the College of Lake County, a local community college. He left after one semester to work as a train conductor on the Wisconsin & Southern Railroad. Unhappy in the job but still taking pictures every chance he got, Kos returned to school after six months and completed his degree.

During this time, one of his photos caught the attention of John Gruber, president of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art. Gruber tapped Kos to assemble and participate in a panel of emerging railfan photographers for the conference.

Since transferring here last fall, Kos has worked in the basement of the Donnelley and Lee Library to catalogue Dubin’s photographs and meets with him once a week in his Highland Park home to learn more about the trains. The images document the “golden era” of passenger trains from the late 19th century to the 1960s, before the national highway system was built and air travel became popular. Kos is also creating an online database.

Dubin’s donation in 2000 gave a boost to a special collection that began after the death of Elliot Donnelley, a former trustee and a longtime railfan who started a company that published catalogues of train model parts. In addition to some 10,000 images, the collection includes books, periodicals, old Chicago rail maps, and other memorabilia like timetables and lanterns used to direct train conductors.

Considering Lake Forest’s ties with the railroad, Miller says Kos is a good fit at the College. “Sayre, uniquely among our student assistants or interns in Special Collections, brings a body of experience both in railroading and in photography,” Miller says. “An exceptional young man in many ways, he has linked generations of Lake Forest’s experiences with railroading.”

Although Kos admires the detail and opulence of the old passenger trains that he sees in Dubin’s photographs, he considers himself a freight-train fan first. “For a lot of people, a freight train is something that stops traffic,” Kos says. But when he sees the trains carrying lumber from Canada, chemicals to California, or paper to mills in the south, “it’s a real geography lesson, so to speak.”

Kos counts himself among an estimated 300,000 railfan photographers. “It’s like a cult hobby,” he says. “Everyone knows where the good spots are and where to go.” His shots, generally taken from at grade crossings, overpasses, or anywhere he can “legally stand,” capture the exterior of trains en route to their destination. “I like to document and get a portrait of trains today and where they go,” he says.

Although he has seen, and possibly chased, hundreds of trains, his favorite remains the Wisconsin Central train that rode through Mundelein every day. “It was my boyhood railroad,” Kos says. “It was the one that ran through town when I was a kid so I still have that attachment.”

Lindsay Beller is the editor of Spectrum.