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Talking Pictures  Quick Take

In this short video, we look at a photograph by Walker Evans, who visited Edwards, Mississippi in 1936. From an elevated vantage point above the railroad tracks, he photographs the tracks running through town and creates an evocative portrait of a small southern town. Along with other photographers working under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration during the depression, Evans produced some of the most memorable images from this troubled time, work that assured his place among the master of American photography.

Edd Fuller, Editor

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A Railfan’s Railroad

A few weeks before Christmas, my good friend Connor Taylor texted me, inviting me on a road trip to visit some of our friends in Pennsylvania during the first week of January, 2022. The first week of January? I thought he was crazy. All I could picture was our car sliding off the side of a cliff in the icy mountains and falling hundreds of feet into a dark, snowy abyss. Perhaps I am crazy myself, for after being informed that the Reading & Northern Railroad was on the list of places to visit, I agreed to come along without any further hesitation.

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Things Unsaid

Grand Central Concourse No 2, 1997

I

Railroad architecture isn’t only stones and cement, iron and steel, vertical elevations and so on. It’s also the spirit, or as we may say, the ‘atmosphere’ of the place. And equally, it’s the culture of the lives that have used it.

If therefore you wanted to know more about major railroad stations with a long history, you could do worse than listen to the opening clip from a radio program called Grand Central Station. The program was sponsored by the Pillsbury Flour company and it aired until 1954. Every week, the listener was drawn into a world where the railroad and the station building intersected with human life.

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Talking Pictures 
Quick Take

In this two minute video, we introduce Quick Takes, a short version of Talking Pictures where we look at a single work by a well know photographer. In this Quick Take, we look at “Meudon, 1928,” one of the best known photographs by André Kertész, which features a steam locomotive passing by high above a Paris street scene.

Edd Fuller, Editor

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Spur Line

The Indigenous people who lived and thrived on the lakeshore called it Ha-AH-chu, meaning Little Lake. That name is remembered today by a vanishingly small number of speakers of the Duwamish language, Lushootseed. To the settlers and builders who supplanted the first people, it became, and still is, Lake Union. To railroaders, it was Region 4 of the Seattle Division. While that name is lost to time, a work of art remembers lakeshore life and the railroading that once was done there.

From nearly its earliest days, Seattle has been a railroad town. Locally mined coal, locally felled timber, locally produced cedar shingles, and silk fabrics imported from Asia by clipper ship were among the many products that transited the growing metropolis. War and economic boomtimes grew the railroads while economic busts, competitive modes of transportation and, most recently, gentrification have caused the presence of trains to shrink and become virtually invisible.

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Living History: Dispatchers

In the effort to preserve railroad history, our efforts are most often focused on the physical aspects of the railroad and its infrastructure. But another, and sometimes neglected, element of history lives in the memories of those railroaders who lived that history as part of their day-to-day job.

In this episode of Legacies: Living History, we talk with three retired train dispatchers for an insider’s look at the job of the dispatcher, the ups and downs of day to day railroad operations, and some memorable stories that took place over the span of nearly 50 years.

Edd Fuller, Editor