WEST UNION - On a sun-splashed late-summer afternoon, Steve Shaluta knelt alongside a grassy trail and reflected on the train wreck that launched his career.
"This is where it happened," he said, pushing some weeds aside to reveal several large bolts twisted badly out of shape. "This is where one of the signal poles was located. The derailment took it out."
Shaluta was at the controls of Amtrak's Shenandoah passenger train when two of its cars jumped the tracks on June 26, 1978 near Morgansville in Doddridge County. In 1985, he left the railroad and, in the decades that followed, became one of West Virginia's best-known and most widely published nature photographers. He said, though, that his life behind the lens would never have unfolded had it not been for that long-ago accident.
"It was something that obviously was meant to be," he said with a wry smile. "The accident set everything in motion."
Shaluta had been interested in art as a young man, but life took him a different direction. Not long after he graduated from Grafton High School he got a job with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which is now part of CSX Transportation. The work was interesting and it paid quite well.
"The railroad invested a lot of money and training on me," he said. "Eventually I worked my way up and became an engineer."
A lot of Shaluta's work took place on the historic stretch of track between Grafton and Parkersburg. Built in 1851 and purchased by the B&O in 1857, the 103-mile Parkersburg Branch provided passenger and freight service until it was abandoned in 1985. The tracks were removed in 1987. In 1991, a 60-mile segment of the line was converted into the North Bend Rail Trail, a recreational pathway open to foot, bicycle and horse traffic.
Shaluta believes his 1978 accident was the last passenger-train derailment to occur on the Parkersburg Branch.
"The accident occurred at 3:40 a.m.," he recalled. "I was the fireman on the Amtrak Shenandoah, and I was at the controls for the first half of the run between Grafton and Parkersburg.
"We were just entering Morgansville when we hit a real bad place in the rail. The train swayed badly, so I started applying the brakes so the passengers wouldn't have so rough a ride. But then the train started lunging. Trains don't lunge unless something is off the tracks."
The train's two locomotives stayed on the rails, but its two passenger coaches didn't. When the cars came uncoupled from the engines, the air hose broke and all the brakes came on full. Even so, momentum carried the 125-ton engines another quarter-mile or so down the track. Shaluta grabbed a flashlight and headed back toward the two cars.
"I was walking beside the track, hitting the flashlight to try to get it to work, when I ran into something in the darkness. It was one of the cars, tipped over against the bank on the uphill side of the tracks," he said.
One passenger had suffered minor injuries, but the other 20 or so people on the train were OK. Fortunately for everyone, the train had been traveling at just 33 miles an hour - less than the speed limit for that section - when the derailment took place.
As fireman, Shaluta was responsible for restoring electrical service to the cars, which he did, and the passengers and crew settled in to wait for the bus that would transport everyone on to Parkersburg. Just after daylight, the train's conductor noticed some activity outside the cars.
"Through the fog, he could see someone taking pictures of the torn-up tracks," Shaluta recalled. "He sent me back to explain that it wasn't safe to do that. The photographer turned out to be a very attractive young lady, and after we got back to the dining car I ended up talking with her until the bus came, and then talked with her on the bus all the way to Parkersburg."
The woman, Susan Carpenter, turned out to be an art teacher at Webster County High School. She and Shaluta ended up dating for five years, during which she rekindled his interest in art and introduced him to photography.
"Once she knew I was interested in photography, she loaned me her camera, her tripod and some lenses, and she sent me up to the Back Fork of Elk above Webster Springs to shoot some pictures," he said.
"I ended up shooting a whole 24-exposure roll of film, which I thought was a lot. I felt guilty because I thought I'd used up all of her film."
Carpenter had the film processed and shared the results with Shaluta the next time he came to visit.
"She had laid out three or four of my shots on a table, alongside an issue of Wonderful West Virginia magazine. She asked me to compare my pictures with one in the magazine. I said mine looked similar," he recalled. "She said, 'That picture is by Arnout Hyde Jr. He does this for a living. This is the first time you've ever used a good camera, and your shots are pretty comparable to his. You have a natural talent for photography."
Shaluta said Carpenter's comment "clicked" with him. Overnight, photography became his favorite pastime.
"I started buying equipment," he added. "With my railroad salary, I could afford things. I bought cameras, lenses, tripods ... everything."
He began submitting photos for publication and, somewhat to his surprise, some of them were published. Encouraged, he thought about making photography a career. He got his chance in 1985.
"The railroad was trying to reduce its workforce, so they offered buyouts in the hope that some of the older employees would retire," Shaluta said. "I saw it as an opportunity; they were paying me to leave a job and start another career."
Not long afterward, Shaluta heard from a couple of friends about a job opening in Charleston.
"[Professional photographers] Arnout Hyde Jr. and Gerald Ratliff, who I had gotten to know when I submitted photos to Wonderful west Virginia, told me that a photographer's position had opened up at the Department of Commerce," he recalled. "I sent a letter to the commissioner, and two and a half months after I left the railroad I had a job."
It was a job he would remain in for 29 years. He traveled the state, shooting tens of thousands of photos that would be used to promote the state's beauty, its parks and its people. By the time he retired in January 2015, thousands of Shaluta's images had appeared in books, magazines, calendars and advertisements from coast to coast.
"Now I shoot what I want to shoot, mainly birds and wildlife," he said. "When you think about it, it's unbelievable what has happened. A train ran off the tracks, I meet a person who encourages me to become a photographer, and then I fall into a job that I spend the rest of my career at.
"If you wrote a story like this, no one would believe it. But that's the way my whole photography career has been. It's like the cards always fell in my direction."