Robert W. Richardson

Robert W. Richardson, also known as Bob Richardson (May 21, 1910, Rochester, Pennsylvania – February 23, 2007, Bellefonte, Pennsylvania) was an American writer and narrow gauge railway preservationist.

Robert W. Richardson was born on May 21, 1910, in Rochester, Pennsylvania. He moved with his parents to Akron, Ohio in 1915, and attended high school there. As a teenager, he enjoyed watching and photographing trains in Ohio and Pennsylvania: his photographic archiving of soon-to-vanish railroads began in May 1931 when he borrowed a camera to record a day with the Ohio River & Western Railway near Key, Ohio. Diverted from a college education, he worked for a local hardware concern before starting his own small print shop. The Depression years were especially hard for printers, and his shop closed in 1937. A keen philatelist, he then worked for George Linn as the second editor of Linn's Weekly Stamp News.

Fortunately for rail hobbyists and historians, Richardson kept up his interest in railroad operations and history. Journeys to northwestern Pennsylvania during the 1930s and early 1940s took him to the Sheffield and Tionesta Railway, the Tionesta Valley Railway and the Clarion River Railway. Anticipating military service, he quit his job with Linn's. Subsequently learning that he would not be called up for some time, he took a job as an advertising representative for the Seiberling Rubber Company, which required him to travel extensively through the southern states.

In the summer of 1941, Richardson and a friend came to Colorado for the first time, making an unforgettable circle tour on the narrow gauge. He became completely enamored of the slim gauge railroads of Colorado. After military service during World War II with the Army Signal Corps in Iran, where he studied the Persian railroads and learned to read Persian, he returned to his job with Seiberling, but made repeated vacation trips touring the Colorado's narrow gauge railroads in 1945, 1946 and 1947, eventually deciding to make his home there.

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