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Keith Pratt

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Keith Pratt was born in Bloomfield, Prince Edward Island on May 25th, 1910. He grew up in a small home right next to a railway track. This close proximity to the railway set the stage for a life long love of trains. During his youth he worked with his uncle at their general store near Bloomfield Station. He was able to afford his first camera in 1925 and began taking pictures of the local train passing by. This hobby blossomed into a passion for train photography and Keith amassed thousands of pictures of trains over his life time, everywhere from Bloomfield to Florida. During World War II Keith enlisted with the army in the United States and served overseas. He survived the war and returned home with numerous photographs from the liberated Nazi death camps in Germany. In 1950 Keith uprooted temporarily from Bloomfield and moved to Boston. Here he married a local woman, and in 1967 he began working with the Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority as a ticket seller. He quickly advanced to the position of a guard, and then in 1969 he became a motorman driving rapid transit trains. Keith described this position as the closest he had ever gotten to heaven. In 1975 Keith retired from the Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority and returned to Bloomfield. In 1979 he moved to Florida where he would spend 9 months a year, and return to Bloomfield every summer until his death, well into his nineties. Keith was a lover of history, especially railway history, and enjoyed searching for old or abandoned railways wherever he could. He also helped numerous people trace their genealogy in his Bloomfield home through his own research and photographs.
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Island Archives
University of Prince Edward Island
inukshuk.ca

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