By Kimberly Matas 11/28/2009
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
the series
This feature chronicles the lives of recently deceased Tucsonans. Some were well-known across the community. Others had an impact on a smaller sphere of friends, family and acquaintances. Many of these people led interesting — and sometimes extraordinary — lives with little or no fanfare. Now you'll hear their stories.
Bob Knoll had a one-track mind.
A railroad track, that is.
His fascination with trains began in infancy, when his mother put him in his stroller and wheeled him to a bridge in the Bavarian town where he grew up to watch the trains pass below.
As a teen in Tucson, he rode his bicycle to the rail yards to photograph trains and the characters who ran them. It was a hobby that lasted a lifetime — well beyond the few years he actually worked for Southern Pacific — and resulted in two books of locomotive photographs.
Knoll was in his train-chasing prime, still, when earlier this year, he suffered a stroke after routine back surgery. He died Sept. 28 as a result of the stroke. Knoll was 74.
He was born in Michigan in 1935, but spent his first dozen or so years living in Germany with his grandparents. Knoll's parents separated shortly after he was born and his mother sent him to live with her parents in their Bavarian village while she settled the divorce back in the United States.
When his mother, a nurse, returned for him a year later, the country was on the cusp of World War II. Seeing the pre-war turmoil in Germany and anticipating the chaos war would bring, Knoll's mother opted to stay in Germany with her son to care for her parents. By war's end, Knoll and his mother were living in a camp in Belgium for displaced persons and ready to return to the States. Because Knoll was a U.S. citizen, he and his mother were granted passage on a ship sailing to New York.
As a single parent, Knoll's mother couldn't hold a job and care for her young son at the same time, so she relinquished him to an orphanage. Working as a live-in nanny and nurse, Knoll's mother would pick up her son for weekends and holidays.
In the early 1950s, Knoll and his mother moved to Tucson where they had friends. While attending Tucson High, Knoll worked as a grocery store box boy and at a laundry while spending his free time taking photos at the rail yard — and occasionally hitching a ride on a freight train.
Bob DeHart was a train dispatcher in Tucson when he met a teenage Knoll.
"He was interested in the railroad and he'd come down there and take pictures of the yard office and the switchman's shanty; any place there was some action," DeHart said. "He was quite a character. He was quite tall and we used to tease him unmercifully, but he took it all. He was unflappable."
Knoll attended the University of Arizona for a year while working as a telegrapher and clerk for Southern Pacific. Family photos show the 6-foot-8-inch tall, 250 pound Knoll stretched out in the small telegrapher's shack with his feet propped up on the desk. Knoll worked for the railroad for seven years and, after being transferred to the Phoenix area, completed his business degree at Arizona State University. After graduating, he quit Southern Pacific, but maintained his connection as a representative for one of the railroad's major shippers in Northern California.
It was in the Golden State that he met his wife of 46 years, Adrienne. The couple had one daughter, Chris, who lives in Colorado.
All the while, whenever he could, Knoll explored rail yards and chased trains, capturing them on film. His photos have appeared in magazines and several railroading books besides his own two, titled: "Bob Knoll's Southern Pacific: The Southern Pacific Railroad Photos of J.R. Knoll," and "Steel Trails: Chasing Arizona Trains in the 1950s."
Tucsonan Paul Chandler, president of The Southern Pacific Historical & Technical Society, had known Knoll for nearly two decades. It is the society that published Knoll's first book.
"One of the missions of the society is to collect and preserve and disseminate information on the history and infrastructure and operations of the Southern Pacific Railroad," Chandler said. "Bob approached us in the early 1990s with his collection of photographs that he'd taken as a teenager and in his early 20s and they were just outstanding."
It was the timing, energy and mechanics of operating locomotives that excited Knoll, said Adrienne, who embarked on many train chases with her husband even though her interest in trains waned by comparison to that of her husband.
"He wasn't really interested in riding in a train," she said. "He wanted to see it go by. He wasn't the least bit interested in being inside a train. If he knew a place where it would be going on a really good curve or someplace the light was just right, he wanted to be there."
Upon retirement in the early '90s, the couple moved to Tucson, where Knoll, a model railroader, attempted to replicate the real thing geographically and structurally. He had a miniature version of Tucson's tracks, stations, junctions and stops built in a room next to his garage. Picacho, Pima Mine, the cement plant, Red Rock, Rillito — they were all on Knoll's tiny route.
"Bob wasn't the type who liked to run them around and around and around. He liked running them like they were real trains with stops and stuff" like the real ones, said his wife.