The transcendent universal compassion of trains being the main street of America reconciles me to a place in time when the rails flourished. The angels whispered the secrets of the night train speeding its way to darkness. I could attend to the gentle chugging of the Railroad, comforted that there was someone else awake in the middle of the night. Tick tick…tick tick… tick tick the soothing steel wheels sound off a smooth rhythm as I sit still in bed. The passing trains are like musicians singing me a song. The whistles fade into the distance as I close my eyes for sleep and for dreaming.
The Union Pacific (UP) Railroad’s Big Boy 4014 made a full day stop at the Union Pacific yard in North Little Rock on Thursday November 14th. This was one stop on its 2019 tour celebrating the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad. The 4014 then departed Little Rock on the following morning, continuing with many more stops along a multi-state tour.
These mechanical behemoths were ordered by Union Pacific and constructed by the American Locomotive Company (ALCO) in Schenectady, New York, during the early 1940’s as America geared up for World War II. Of the twenty such locomotives delivered to UP by ALCO, the 4014 is the only one of the handful of remaining Big Boys which has been restored to operational service. The rest are reposing in various Railroad Museums across the Western United States.
After returning non-stop to Bangor by air from the Center for Railroad Photography & Art’s highly successful annual conference, Conversations 2019, at Lake Forest College, I made an unanticipated decision to revisit Northern Maine Junction, located two miles west of the the airport. To me it was a sacred place.
Indeed, most of these images have trains. But in all, it’s the location that defines them. It’s been said that if one first finds a beautiful location—simply add a train, and Bingo!
Location is everything in these photos and they all shout, “Desert!” They are the result of a mad-dash trip last January to attend an event in Phoenix, Arizona. This was not an intended photo trip (we were on a mission!) but I was able to pull off a few roadside doors-open-engine-running compositions.
I grew up looking at well lit, telephoto images of trains plying the scenery in magazines discarded from the library. I wanted get to there, for my photos to end up well-circulated and glossy. Instead, I ended up walking along the tracks, making images that looked nothing like what I saw in print. Most of the time, I wouldn’t see any trains and would shoot a few details along the way. When a train would appear, the only way to get a shot was to sprint off the right-of-way, head up a bank, and hope for a clear shot with a 50mm which had the ability of capturing too wide and not nearly enough all at the same time.
Once, routine was a fact of life on the railroad. Whether by timetable, by train-order or simply by custom, everyone had a general idea of what to expect at any given time of the day or night. So too in Bonsack, Virginia, not ten miles from Roanoke, where a heavy steam-powered coal train will go into the Blue Ridge mountains this evening before nightfall. And even as the station agent is shutting up shop and the sound of crickets fills the air, there is a distant thunder of two articulated steam locomotives beginning their nightly climb away from the Roanoke Valley.
There is certainly history in this place, settled as it was after the Revolutionary War in 1783, and what’s more, its original station was burned to the ground by Union troops in 1864. But at least as important as recorded history is how entwined the Norfolk & Western Railway was with the people and the landscape along its tracks in the middle of the last century.
When I think back sixty-one years to these late-evening scenes, I’m reminded of a time when an emotional connection with the landscape—and by extension, with the railroad that ran through it—seemed fixed and enduring. It’s a feeling never better expressed than in the haunting last bars of Aaron Copland’s musical tone-poem, Appalachian Spring.
Indeed, in the darkening minutes it has taken for this long train to pass, Bonsack and its modest station have been changed into such an elegiac nightfall as Copland created in his music. Silenced crickets have welled up again from the deep shadows, and the sound of the receding train has become the ageless immensity of the Blue Ridge.
History is one thing, and continuity another. In 1958 both were there for the taking in rural Bonsack. If only for the time being.
Robert Field – Text and photographs Copyright 2019
