User:Monado/Elizabeth A. Willmot

Elizabeth A. Willmot (b. 1918) is the author of three books about the history of railroads and railroading in the province of Ontario, Canada. She photographed every rail station in Ontario and many elsewhere. Her books present a small selection of her photographs.

Life
Willmot's fascination with railways began when she was a small child and her family took a train for a Christmas visit to her grandparents' farm near Aurora, Ontario. Her father, Charles Willmot, was an architect who encouraged her to learn architecture.

Willmot spent most of her life in Ontario, but when she was a child, her father moved the family, including five children, to Pasadena, California. There he practised architecture in Los Angeles for a few years. Elizabeth, aged nine, used to take walks with an elderly Albert Einstein.

When the family returned to Ontario, Willmot's grandfather gave her a violin, which she learned to play. Lessons were cut short when her father's income fell. However, she loved music and played the violin into her eighties, with some interruptions: her first husband ridiculed her playing and she stopped during their brief, unhappy marriage. For some time, "her creative pursuits stagnated."

Her second husband, the artist Charles William (Bill) Kettlewell (1914-1988), encouraged her to do everything she could. She studied photography in Banff, Alberta and began to win awards. Her first book, in 1976, showed her photographs of Ontario railway stations, many of which no longer exist. It was the first popular book to about them. She also photographed trains and the railway workers, whom she found fascinating. In all, she took thousands of photographs and wrote three books.

For many years, Willmot and her husband lived in Clinton, Ontario.

Works
Meet Me at the Station is about railroads and railroad stations, published in 1976. It records details of the architecture of construction and architecture of stations. It also describes the effect of rail lines and rail construction on local economies.

Faces and Places Along the Railway described the geography of areas served by the railway.

When Any Time Was Train Time describes and illustrates the history of steam-powered trains in Ontario, when rail transport, not highways, connected communities.

Elizabeth Willmot Kettlewell is credited with writing an article about the CNR's 1926 mobile school, the "School on Wheels," which became a small historical museum in Clinton, Ontario.