Great Writers' Lessons for Railroad Photographers
Scott Lothes
The Center for Railroad Photography and Art
Lake Forest, Illinois
April 12, 2008

After graduating from college in 2002, and before I started working, I took a two-month road trip through the northwest. Three years of photographing trains had brought me to a point of maturity in what we often call traditional railroad photography. I felt like I knew what it took to make a good train picture, and several photos from that trip later appeared in CTC Board.

Upon returning to Cleveland and entering the workforce, I endeavored to write a travel story about my big trip out west. And what I learned from that exercise...was that my writing was really bad. So I went to the bookstore and bought a copy of John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley, to see whether I could learn something about travel writing. I enjoyed it so much that I quickly bought and read The Grapes of Wrath, considered by many to be Steinbeck's greatest work.

While reading Grapes, I found something that I wasn't expecting: trains. Not often, but here and there in the folds of that 500-page tapestry were vignettes of railroads. A freight train passing in the night, an itinerant family taking refuge in an abandoned boxcar. Steinbeck's writing got me hooked on reading literature; the trains were simply an added bonus. And yet, the more I read, the more references I found to trains and railroads.

In those fall months of 2002, when I was struggling to write anything meaningful about my summer travels, I was also struggling with my photography. The boxes of slides that came back from my trip, and the months following it, were satisfying, but very few of the images really grabbed me. It was only after I started reading literature that my photography expanded beyond the traditional school, and I don't think that was coincidental.

Literature is a window to the world, reflecting people, landscapes, and attitudes. The better we understand the world around us, the better we can photograph it. Reading literature can help us do that, and the best part is that railroads appear with surprising frequency. Today I'd like to give you a brief introduction to railroads in literature - especially American literature - while highlighting some of the ways that we can expand our photography by reading.

********

American literature really started to emerge in mid-19th century New England, with writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. That was the EXACT same time that the first railroads were being built in the U.S., and all of these early American authors wrote about the new technology.

Hawthorne, who was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, is known best for his novels like The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. But he also provided us with one of the first and most striking literary examples of the railroad coming into the countryside. One morning Hawthorne sat down in a New England forest to await, as he said, "such little events as may happen." He began with a detailed description of his tranquil setting.

But hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive - the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in the country village, men of business, in short of all unquietness; and no wonder that it gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace.

This is why I am fascinated by literature's treatment of railroads. I've always thought of trains passing through rural scenery as an idyllic blending of technology with nature, the American Pastoral epitomized by George Inness's painting, "The Lackawanna Valley."

Hawthorne rips this image to pieces. The railroad was an unwelcomed and foreboding intruder, and this perspective deeply challenges my long-established view. But I hope that's part of why you came today, to be challenged in your photography. To most of us in this room, the sound of a steam whistle is music to our ears. Hawthorne had the audacity to call that music "harsh, above all other harshness." How do we, as railroad photographers, respond to this?

Hawthorne's contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, provided some insight. Emerson, one of this country's greatest men of letters, understood quite well what the railroad would bring to the New England countryside. The following journal entry, penned two years before Hawthorne's, was both less judgmental, and more visionary.

I hear the whistle of the locomotive in the woods. Wherever that music comes it has its sequel. It is the voice of the civility of the Nineteenth Century saying, "Here I am." It is interrogative: it is prophetic: and this Cassandra is believed: "Whew! Whew! Whew! How is real estate here in the swamp and wilderness? Ho for Boston! Whew! Whew! . . . I will plant a dozen houses on this pasture next moon, and a village anon. . . .

The prose has a driving force that echoes both the cadence of the locomotive, and the impending changes in the landscape. In the work of both Emerson and Hawthorne, we see the railroad as a catalyst of development, an agent of modernity and industrialization. For them, the new steel rails were ominous, and their writing sounded a warning for the changes it would bring.

********

Decades later, American authors were still writing about how railroads were changing the nation. Sherwood Anderson was born to a poor family in 1876 and grew up in small-town, northern Ohio. Years later, he wrote about his boyhood experiences in his seminal work, Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson's writing often included railroads, particularly the way they connected small towns and rural communities with the rest of the world, bringing in cosmopolitan tastes while carrying away their harvests, and fueling the dreams of aspiring youths. This passage comes at the end of Winesburg.

When the train came into the station George felt instantly relieved. He scampered hurriedly aboard...When the train started Tom Little punched his ticket, grinned and, although he knew George well and knew on what adventure he was just getting out, made no comment. Tom had seen a thousand George Willards go out of their towns to the city.

As rail enthusiasts we're quite familiar with the way railroads engendered thousands of small towns across the American landscape of the late 19th century. Looking back, we can see clearly see the connections. The difference with Anderson, Emerson, and Hawthorne is that they saw those connections looking FORWARD. They quickly realized the transformation that railroads were bringing, and wrote often on the subject.

In our own landscape of the early 21st century, railroads continue to bring new changes. Every weekday morning, two MARC commuter trains leave Martinsburg, West Virginia, and run all the way to Washington Union Station. Three trains return every evening. It wasn't very long ago that Martinsburg was a run-down, former division point town with a crumbling roundhouse and quiet streets. Today, local artisans have opened downtown shops, and new condos and subdivisions crowd the town from all sides. These new developments at Martinsburg, and across the country to Portland, Oregon - these are all railroad-created landscapes. As railroad photographers, they are well worth the attention of our cameras, even if they don't have trains or even tracks in them.

Harvard professor and American cultural geographer John Stilgoe writes of the changes railroads have wrought in the past, and those they will bring in the future. His new book, Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape, considers the growing impact of railroads in places exactly like Martinsburg all across the country. And here's the hook. In Martinsburg, these changes are happening with traditional equipment running on a busy freight line. The ride into DC takes two hours! What will be the impact of high-speed, dedicated commuter rail corridors at hundreds of Martinsburgs across the country?

A contemporary voice from Japan warns us that not all of these changes will necessarily be good. Haruki Murakami is my favorite Japanese writer, and one of my favorite writers anywhere. His numerous novels and short stories have been translated into dozens of languages.

While Japan has a REMARKABLE rail-passenger network, it also has one of the most heavily-altered landscapes in the world. Entire native forests are clear-cut and replanted, and concrete is slathered lavishly on hillsides, riverbanks, and coastlines. The fast trains attempt to hide the scars by blowing past them at 150 miles-an-hour, but Murakami highlights the futility of this approach. The following scene takes place on a bullet train in his novel, A Wild Sheep Chase:

The train moved on, and as it did, the sky turned a rain-gray. Beneath which stretched the same boring scenery. No matter how much speed we put on, there was no escaping boredom. On the contrary, the faster the speed, the more headway into boredom. Ah, the nature of boredom.

This passage serves a foreboding warning to Japan and other modern societies, including our own. If we create homogenous, boring landscapes, then no matter how fast we can travel across them, whether by jetliner or high-speed train, they're still homogenous, boring landscapes. Several fine art photographers have been addressing this trend for years. As railfans, we tend to bemoan the loss of regional identity in railroads. It could be interesting to respond to that photographically, perhaps with a study of identical stack trains carrying identical consumer goods across landscapes defined by identical strip malls and big box discount stores.

********

So far we've been looking at how railroads affect landscapes, and what literature says about that. Now I'm going to shift the focus from landscapes to people. And I'm going to start in the 1920s, a decade often considered the golden age of steam and passenger railroading in America. Contrary to the national economy, however, the literature of this era was not silver-lined.

The 1920s gave rise to the "Lost Generation" of writers including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. They came of age during World War I and grappled with the clash between 20th century moralities and 19th century ideals. Most lived hard and died young, always searching for something they could never quite find. Many sought some childhood vestige that got lost in the modern world, and railroads were often a bridge reconnecting them to the past. In Anderson, we saw a young man leave his home by train; in the "Lost Generation," we see those same young men peering back down the tracks to the childhoods they left behind. A striking example occurs in a flashback scene of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before melting indistinguishably into it again.

That's my Middle West - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth...

As railroad photographers, many of us relate very well to these feelings that Fitzgerald evokes. Earlier in this passage, the narrator even mentioned the yellow paint of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul passenger cars. Those trains defined the entire landscape of his adolescence. But it was the feel of the train ride that tugged most strongly at his emotions: the cold of the snow, the warmth of the dining car, the lighted windows throwing their glow on the white ground. All these elements come together to capture the nostalgia for the time and place of the narrator's childhood, and these are all elements that we can photograph.

********

The romance of Pullman car travel comes up time and again in the writing of the 1920s, and especially in the writing of Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe grew up in Ashville, North Carolina, obtained a master's from Harvard, and settled in New York. He often traveled by train between his new and old homes, and coined the phrase "starlight on the rails," which Jeff Brouws and Ed Delvers later used as the title for their book. Wolfe's novel, You Can't Go Home Again, takes the theme we saw in The Great Gatsby and expands it to explore class differences, a gap that widened considerably during the 1920s.

To anyone outside, a speeding train is a thunderbolt of driving rods, a hot hiss of steam, a blurred flash of coaches, a wall of movement and of noise, a shriek, a wail, and then just emptiness and absence, with a feeling of "There goes everybody!" without knowing who anybody is. And all of a sudden the watcher feels the vastness and loneliness of America, and the nothingness of all those little lives hurled past upon the immensity of the continent. But if one is inside the train, everything is different. The train itself is a miracle of man's handiwork, and everything about it is eloquent of human purpose and direction...One's own sense of manhood and of mastery is heightened by being on a train.

Wolfe reminds us of the great dichotomy between those who could be on the train, and those who could not. We often think of the 1920s as a remarkably prosperous decade in this country, but it was also a decade of growing economic polarization. Only the wealthy could afford the luxury of hurtling about the country in Pullman sleeping cars. To so many others, especially in rural areas between the thriving cities, the passing trains were harsh and frequent reminders of their staid struggles for survival.

Even today, I suspect these sentiments of immobility linger, especially in the countless small towns where trains rush by without ever stopping, those great expanses of "flyover country" that exist between the population centers of the coasts and the Midwest. It's all too easy to forget about those places, and so I'm particularly grateful to the photographers and writers that remind me.

********

When I was traveling and living in Asia, I got a very different impression of rail passenger service. The term "people's railway" comes to mind in communist-influenced countries like China and Vietnam, where the trains are less about luxury and more about accessibility.

One American author who wrote on that very idea was Pearl S. Buck, who was born in West Virginia but spent most of her life in eastern China. She was writing at the same as Wolfe and Fitzgerald, but the similarities end there. Buck is best known for The Good Earth, a story of the Chinese land, and of family's struggle to build a life on that land. During a terrible drought, the entire family goes south in order to survive. They begin by walking, but are soon swept into a multitude going to catch a train.

The man said, "We are starving people and we are going to catch the firewagon and ride to the south. It leaves from yonder house and there are wagons for such as we for the price of less than a small silver piece."

When we read about starving people traveling by train in North America, we read almost exclusively about freight hopping. Even today, as witnessed by this photo of Mexican immigrants, which was a runner-up in last year's Pulitzer Prize. Yet in China, we have this example of the poor traveling by passenger train.

Reading about the accessibility of railroads in other parts of the world, forces us to consider the exclusivity of our own system, whether it's luxurious passenger trains forcing out lower class citizens, or gigantic unit trains forcing out all small customers. This has led directly to the obscurity of modern American railroads in the public eye, and that obscurity could make for many fascinating photography projects.

********

Freight hopping appears quite a bit in American literature, and there are detailed scenes in Steinbeck's novel In Dubious Battle, which examines the organized labor movement of the 1930s. It reminds us of the disparate roles railroads played in that movement. While trains carried the workers and the crops they picked, they were also used by the orchard owners to bring in trainloads of strike-breakers.

We've all waited for countless trains to arrive, but Steinbeck used the wait to build tension in one of the book's key scenes. It's a very effective use of what many of us consider the most boring part of our photography. The expected train is carrying replacement workers into the middle of a strike. The labor activists hope to convince at least some of the new arrivals to join their fight. Mac, the chief organizer, opens the scene:

"Jesus, I wish the train'd come in. Waiting raises hell with guys like ours. They get scared when they have to wait around."

A number of the men were sitting down on the curb by now. A buzz of quiet talk came from the close-pressed line. They were hemmed in, railroad guards on one side, motorcycle police and deputy sheriffs on the other. The men looked nervous and self-conscious. The sheriff's deputies carried their rifles in two hands, held across their stomachs.

"The cops are scared, too," Mac said.

London reassured a group of men. "They ain't goin' to do no shootin'," he said. "They can't afford to do no shootin'."

Can't you just feel the tension in this scene? And if there are any signal fans here today, take note. A Nobel Prize-winning author actually wrote about a semaphore. It's an important element, and it's interesting to note that semaphores were common enough in the 1930s to be included, without a definition, in a mainstream novel.

From this passage, I'm forced to confront the issue that the things trains carry...are not always good. Reconciling myself to that fact has been - and continues to be - incredibly difficult. Yet I cannot ignore the arguments of writers like Ann Pancake, a contemporary West Virginia author who has written one of the most haunting portrayals of railroads that I have ever read. Her short story "Dog Song" presents a SCATHING commentary on one of the state's excursion trains. As railroad enthusiasts, we tend to think of excursion trains and tourist railroads as benevolent, family-friendly operations. Ms. Pancake casts one in an entirely different light.

The train slunk around the turn and into sight, its bad music an earbeat, a gutbeat, ta TA ta TA ta TA, locomotive slow-pulling for the sightseers to better see the sights, and how did they explain Matley? Plopped between Winnebagos and househole with some eighteen doghouses up his yard. How did he fit into this land that time forgot? ta TA ta TA ta TA, the beat when it passed the joints in the rails, and the screee sound over the rail beat, and even over top that, a squealing, that ear-twisting song, a sorry mean ear-paining song. Starers shouldered up in open cars with cameras bouncing off golf-shirted bellies, and from the enclosed cars, some would wave. They would only wave if they were behind glass. And Matley would never wave back.

When I've photographed in Appalachia, I've too often avoided the trailer parks and disheveled homesteads in favor of more idyllic scenes. "Dog Song," however, raises an important issue of land use by questioning how a scene that many consider to be an "eye sore" fits into the landscape of a scenic railroad. Is it the owner's right to do whatever he wants on the land? Or the railroad's right to have an attractive view? These questions are especially prescient for impoverished, post-industrial rural communities that are trying to reinvent themselves through tourism. This could be a fascinating photography project, but it would have to be approached very carefully, and very respectfully.

********

This transitions directly to an issue that vexes me every time I return to my homestate of West Virginia. I love watching trains thread its hills and valleys. And I equally abhor the modern mining practices that destroy those hills and valleys. How then should I photograph a coal train, something that I see as both wonderful and terrible at the same time? I've been trying to figure that out for many years. Along the way, I've found insight from a number of literary sources, but the most surprising came from Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau is considered the father of environmental writing, and his book Walden is considered its Bible. Thoreau lived simply in a log cabin on Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts for two years -- right after the Fitchburg Railroad completed its mainline beside the pond. I expected Thoreau to build on the responses of his mentors, Emerson and Hawthorne, and lash out even more vehemently against the encroaching railroads and their shrieking trains. Perhaps, then, you will be as surprised as I was by his response to the railroad:

...when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils...it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it.

Far from being appalled by the railroad, Thoreau was enthralled by it. He often used its right-of-way to walk into town, and welcomed its workers into his cabin, where they were among his favorite guests. In man's creation of the fire-breathing railway train, it would seem that he had transcended into a harmonious coexistence with Nature. But Thoreau had a little more to say about the trains whistling past Walden Pond, and particularly about their creators.

In the end, Thoreau did not denounce the railroad, but he certainly denounced the intentions of its builders. So maybe it's okay for me to love the trains of West Virginia, and not what they carry. What's not okay is for me to love the trains and ignore what they carry. Becoming a more informed, conscientious photographer continues to be a struggle, so I'm glad I have Thoreau's writing to help guide the way.

In Walden, and indeed in most of the writing we've considered so far, the railroad was only a minor element. There are a few works, however, that use railroads in far greater contexts. Two contemporary writers are Linda Niemann and Paul Theroux. Theroux has written many travelogues that took place on trains, and I really hope you've read some of Niemann's stories about working as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific.

Then there's Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, which uses a fictitious transcontinental railroad as one of its primary settings. Be forewarned that Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged to promote her philosophical views, but even so, her depictions of railroading are vividly captivating. While enthralled by technology, Rand is quick to point out that humankind both creates and sustains it. The railroad of her novel, Taggart Transcontinental, is both mighty and fragile, capable of heroic deeds under sound stewardship, but quickly prone to failure without it.

On the night of October 15, a copper wire broke in New York City, in an underground control tower of the Taggart Terminal, extinguishing the lights of the signals.

It was only the breach of one wire, but it produced a short circuit in the interlocking traffic system, and the signals of motion or danger disappeared from the panels of the control towers and from among the strands of rail. The red and green lenses remained red and green, not with the living radiance of sight, but with the dead stare of glass eyes. On the edge of the city, a cluster of trains gathered at the entrance to the Terminal tunnels and grew through the minutes of stillness, like blood dammed by a clot inside a vein, unable to rush into the chambers of the heart.

First, Rand reminds us of the importance of even the tiniest components to railroad operations, as was brilliantly captured by Steve Crise in this year's TRAINS photo contest. We also see humanity as the master of technology, as both creator and maintainer of the signaling system. But then we also have technology as the master of humanity, in the people stranded in the backed-up trains. The master-servant relationship between humanity and technology is a fascinating subject, and well-worth our exploration.

********

This last author is one of my favorites. Jack Kerouac grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, the youngest of three children born to French-Canadian parents. After dropping out of Columbia University, he turned to a life of writing and traveling, working an endless variety of jobs along the way. One of his most stable vocations was as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific in the 1950s. He wrote about that experience in what is perhaps my favorite of his writings, "The Railroad Earth."

and here's all these Millbrae and San Carlos neat-necktied producers and commuters of America and Steel civilization rushing by with San Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough time to be disdainful, they've got to catch 130, 132, 134, 136 all the way to 146 till the time of evening supper in homes of the railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hotshot freight trains.

This story is included in his collection of non-fiction, Lonesome Traveler. At 46 pages it's the longest in the book, and abounds with railroad imagery throughout. As families eat dinner "in homes of the railroad earth," Emerson's prophecy of a century earlier is fulfilled. Every time I read this story, I come away with new ideas, and I'm certainly not the first to be inspired by Kerouac's madcap writing. Richard Steinheimer, Jeff Brouws, and Kevin Scanlon -- to name just a few -- all cite his influence.

It was Kerouac who finally helped me come to terms with Cleveland, Ohio, where I lived for eight years. "The Railroad Earth" is a story about the California landscape, yet it is somehow, simultaneously, a story for railroad landscapes everywhere. Kerouac begins by comparing the back alley adjacent the San Francisco yards to the back alleys beside the tracks in Lowell, his hometown. And suddenly I could see the back alleys of Cleveland in context with the back alleys of other places, places I often dreamed of being when I felt like I was stuck in Cleveland, places like Portland, Oregon and Logan, West Virginia. And so I began to photograph the railroad earth of Cleveland, especially the old industrial areas and the bridges spanning the Cuyahoga River.

********

We've just considered the works of more than a dozen authors. They, in turn, considered railroads from a wide variety of perspectives. However, one thing that they all had in common, was that they had a very clearly defined PURPOSE for the way they used railroads in their writing.

As a photographer, the most important lesson I have learned from reading literature is that great writing, the kind that endures, serves a purpose. Those purposes can be wide-ranging, but in some way or another, all great writing reflects the world in which it was created. Emerson's and Hawthorne's purpose was to warn of the developments railroads would bring; Thomas Wolfe delineated class differences by the walls of Pullman cars; Jack Kerouac portrayed the interconnectedness of the vast American landscape through the universality of railroading.

We tend to lump all railroad photographs into one of two groups: first, there's the traditional style of front-lit, three quarter views; and then, there's everything else. I find this tendency unsettling. I'm of the opinion that this photo, and this photo, both belong in the same group. And that's because, to me, they both have the same purpose. Despite their differences in lighting and composition, both were taken to glorify the train.

As railroad photographers, I believe we would do well to spend more time reflecting on the purposes of our photography, and the way that fits into our broader world views. Glorifying trains is certainly one purpose, and given that we all like trains, it's an important purpose. But it's only one, and there are so many more out there involving railroads, that are just ripe for our consideration.

Two years ago at this conference, Jeff Brouws challenged us to embrace the broader contexts of railroads as they relate to social, political, and economic issues. Photographing for any one of these issues, is to photograph for a different PURPOSE. Choosing our purpose is at the crux of all the decisions we make as photographers. It was also at the crux of all the decisions made by the writers we've been looking at today.

On the Center's website, I've posted a partial list of literary works that consider railroads, available here:

http://www.railphoto-art.org/writing.htm

This list is by no means comprehensive, but it should serve as a good starting point. I encourage you to pick up one of these titles, take it with you the next time you head trackside, and use it to fill those long waits between trains. When you look back up to take your next photo, you might just find yourself inspired to point your camera in a new direction, and for a new purpose.