H. Reid

Reid grew up with the railroad. His childhood home in Norfolk, Virginia was adjacent to the massive Lamberts Point facilities with general merchandise and coal piers of the Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W). Author Lloyd D. Lewis, who was a child when he first met Reid, relates that "H" (as he preferred to be called) printed a small newspaper for his neighbors as a child. Reid attended Elon College (now Elon University) in Elon, North Carolina and graduated from the College of William and Mary of Williamsburg, Virginia. He and his wife Virginia (née Ewell) Reid lived in Norfolk near the Virginian Railway (VGN) tracks leading to Sewell's Point.

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 Kalmbach, 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, Reid wrote his epoch work, The Virginian Railway, which was published by Kalmbach in 1961. The book combined his photography with a storytelling style with facts. Reprinted three times, first and second editions of The Virginian Railway have become valued as collectible items. Reid's other published work include contributions to Trains Magazine, and 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, including 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.

Reid died in 1992, aged 67.

• Reid, H. (1953) Trains & Travel Magazine, December 1953, "Some Fine Engines", Kalmbach Publishing Co.