Newspaperman, Author, Railfan
Reid was a newspaperman by trade and worked a brief time in public relations for the local Norfolk County Public Schools in what is now the City of Chesapeake. He began honing his art with black and white photography with a Brownie box camera when he was a child in the 1930s. Black and white remained his favored medium even as color photography became popular in the 1950s. He contributed articles and photographs to Trains magazine, published by Kalbach,and his work was noted by its longtime editor David P. Morgan.
Following a long friendship with the Assistant to the General Manager of the coal-hauling Virginian Railway, after that company's merger into the N&W in 1959, he wrote his epoch work, The Virginian Railway, which was published by Kalmbach in 1961. In that book, Reid combined his some of the best of his photography with a storytelling style and depth of facts which have helped the "Richest Little Railroad in the World" live on the hearts of its former employees, railfans, and new generations of children who had yet to be born when it became a fallen flag through merger in 1959. Reprinted three times, first and second editions of The Virginian Railway have become valued as collectible items.
Reid's other published work include many contributions to Trains Magazine, two other books, Extra South, (1964), published by Starucca Valley Publishing, and Rails Through Dixie written with Johnny Krause (1965), published by Golden West Books. His photography work has been featured in many other publications, notably several by Lloyd D. Lewis which include The Virginian Era (1992), Virginian Railway Locomotives (1993), and Norfolk and Western and Virginian Railways in Color by H. Reid (1994), all published by TLC Publishing of Lynchburg, Virginia. His photographs have been published in many other books.
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