Passenger Trains in the Postmodern Landscape: An Artist’s Perspective

J. Craig Thorpe is a self-employed artist specializing in contemporary rail subjects. Published nationally, his art and lectures reach beyond the rail fraternity to the general public. He is a fellow with Seattle’s Cascadia Project, a director of the Washington Association of Rail Passengers, and operations director of the Issaquah Valley Trolley, a nonprofit group reviving passenger rail east of Seattle. He lives in Bellevue with his wife Cathy and their three children. (jcraigthorpe@msn.com; http://www.jcraigthorpe.com.)

During a recent local event where I was invited to paint a demonstration canvas, I stood at my easel and talked with the visitors. The conversational pattern was all too predictable. “Ah, so you paint trains. How interesting…” (Translation: quaint, nostalgic.)

To which I responded, “But did you also notice that these paintings are contemporary and suggestive of what we might have for future train travel?” “Well… yeah,” came the reply, “it looks like you, ah…really found your niche.” (Translation: nice for you, but really quite irrelevant.)

Nostalgic but irrelevant. The words aptly describe the current American view toward passenger trains. Yet the passenger train must be restored as a critical part of our cultural and social infrastructure, for while it might conjure nostalgic feelings, it is far from irrelevant. In fact, the passenger train is more than “just an outmoded form of transportation” because it embodies and enables enduring values critical to societal well-being.

Relating transportation systems to cultural health and renewal may require an enormous mental leap, but that is exactly the connection I make. Further, as an artist deeply concerned with the erosion of aesthetics and the national landscape, I see representational art as a critical key in establishing that connection. It is American modernism that has devalued the passenger train, beauty and our landscapes. Ironically, the postmodern era may offer the necessary openness for their restoration, and in the process reestablish civility.

The temperature was a dry 105 degrees Fahrenheit on the rim of Arizona’s Grand Canyon as I mingled with the crowds at El Tovar, the magnificent hotel, built by the Santa Fe Railway in 1905. I was there at the request of the Grand Canyon Railway, current operator of the century-old rail line that stretches 65 miles from Williams, Arizona, to the canyon. A park crisis was at hand: on a typical day 6,000 cars jostled for 2,400 parking spaces. The National Park Service had solicited ideas for a transit system linking the historic area with a parking lot outside the park. The railway wanted me to help design and illustrate its rail option.

As I looked across those 12 miles of chasm, I reflected on decades of Grand Canyon promotional art. Ironically, it had been sponsored, not by the park service nor preservationists, but by the former bastion of American industry: the railroads. It was the Santa Fe Railway who commissioned Thomas Moran to portray this wonder; likewise, Louis Akins, who painted the very trail I now hiked. Countless magazine advertisements depicted the Grand Canyon with glowing illustrations and eloquent copy. “A mile deep, miles wide, and painted like a sunset,” 1 or “Most Sublime of All Earthly Scenes …a colossal chasm…filled with magnificent rock temples aflame with changing colors.” 2

That the railroads were a prime political and financial force in the development of our national parks is a forgotten fact. My colleague and mentor in these matters, Dr. Alfred Runte, has coined the term “pragmatic alliance” 3 to describe this unique relationship between the western railroads, the government and early preservationists. Beginning in the late 19th century and lasting for decades, the relationship was not totally altruistic, but had lasting implications for stewardship of life and land.

Those preservationists, looking for allies against unrestrained mining and logging, felt that the railroads, with their interest in promoting the beauties of the West, might also be sympathetic to the preservationist ideals. They were. John Muir, “patron saint” of the Sierra Club, declared in 1890, “Even the soulless Southern Pacific R.R. Co., never counted on anything for good, helped nobly in pushing the bill for (Yosemite) park through Congress.” 4 In 1911, 1913 and 1915 the western railroads were active participants in national park conferences and their support was critical to the founding of the National Park Service in 1916.

The railroads willingly threw their prestige and money into preservation, and opened all the parks to responsible public access: Yosemite, Yellowstone, Sequoia, Mt. Rainier, Crater Lake, Glacier, Rocky Mt., Zion, Bryce, and of course, Grand Canyon. These successes were celebrated by decades of brilliant railroad art—”landscapes of expectation”—that presented vignettes of relationships and enduring landscape on every poster, brochure and ad.

Once aboard, a passenger’s experience of community had been central to the whole journey. Conversation unfolded as did an appreciation of the monumental landscapes with the ever-changing vistas beyond the windows. Tourists from around the world flocked to stand in awe at the rim and hike the trails to the tumbling Colorado River a mile below.

However, by 1916—even as railways in the United States peaked at 250,000 miles—”motoring” had become a national trend. Even the National Park Service, steward of these wilderness treasures, uncritically endorsed the auto and its culture. America’s love affair with the auto took hold, and the impact was felt at Grand Canyon. As the number of auto visitors swelled, those arriving by rail steadily declined until the last Santa Fe passenger train departed Canyon Depot in 1968. By 1974, the line itself was abandoned.

Modernism demanded we keep up with the times through the flexibility, privacy and speed of the auto. We willingly obliged. Ironically, the famous streamliners of the 30s, 40s and 50s, including those that served Grand Canyon, were themselves classic expressions of rail modernism. These were the great years of industrial design, with new materials and sleek lines suggesting speed, comfort and progress.

The triumphs of the era led the New York Central to name its flagship train the 20th Century Limited, and the rival Pennsylvania Railroad introduced a line of passenger cars known as the “Fleet of Modernism.” But the modernism that birthed all of these beauties—now mutated by rampant individualism—brought about their demise.

The Chevy freed the tourist from the “constraints” of Santa Fe’s coaches and Pullmans. It also released the tourist from real community and responsible visitation. Runte puts it eloquently:

“As the use of automobiles proliferated, so did the public’s taste for distractive or even destructive pursuits. Lost… was that sense of community and shared responsibility that railroad travel had fostered, not to mention its supporting images of responsibility—that glowing package of literature, photographs and commissioned works of art whose constant, subliminal message had been one of public stewardship.” 5

On the day of my visit, most of the tourists jamming the gift shops had come by car, and the crowded parking lots did as much to model public stewardship as the hassled drivers did to model civility! But over 350 of us had arrived—refreshed and civil—by train. What had happened to that abandoned line? In spite of several attempts to revive the branch, it languished for over a decade. Then in 1987 it was purchased and rebuilt by Phoenix investors Max and Thelma Biegert. The restored Grand Canyon Railway now carries 188,000 passengers and keeps over 75,000 vehicles out of the park each year.

Now here I was, an artist retained by a railway, recreating a relationship and task unseen in America for 40 years. But rather than help open the park to responsible visitation, as my predecessors had done, my job was to reinterpret responsible visitation. Easy and open park access simply invited all of urban life into so-called protected wilderness. Gone was the pragmatic alliance with its larger commitment to preservation. In fact, none of the players in this new “expedient alliance” could see beyond solving the immediate problem of traffic congestion within the park.

Even the park service, with its proposed guided bus system, wouldn’t venture far beyond internal combustion transportation, the familiar and omnipotent technology of modernism. There was no sense of greater vision, nor of context. No one saw the merits of a connection with the railway, which was already in the park and effectively doing the job (albeit at a very small scale), let alone a connection with Amtrak’s daily Chicago-LA rail service.

And why couldn’t they see it? Simply, modernism had relegated the Grand Canyon Railway and even Amtrak to tourists. Neither could serve as serious transportation or serious preservation. In other words, trains were nostalgic and therefore essentially irrelevant. They could never be seen as legitimate models for solving the problems.

The team assembled to design and visualize the railway’s proposal had the double task of educating not only the park service, environmentalists and media, but even the railway management to the greater vision. Their initial plan called for typical locomotives and massive double-deck commuter cars. This was pure “expedience,” for it was no different from any urban transit situation—solve the traffic problem—and evidenced little consideration for scale and landscape of the Grand Canyon area. I then located newly designed German railcars, with low profiles and large windows, which would be perfectly suited to the need.

But now there was another challenge. I was asked, “Why not just digitally drop an image of the railcar into photos of the setting?” The voice of expedience was speaking again, suggesting any image would work to vindicate an idea. Not only that, but the comment reflected the modern view that “newer—in this case high-tech imagery—is better.”

How different, I thought, from the days when the Santa Fe had retained the artists Moran and Akins to excite, educate and inspire. The railway had early photography at its disposal, but readily moved beyond the camera’s literalness and chose instead to have beauty and vision move through the artist’s eyes, mind and hand. This did nothing less than nourish and uplift the soul.

Fortunately, the Grand Canyon Railway did indeed choose art to introduce the preservation theme, and the elegant booklet announcing the railway’s plan was designed around five new “landscapes of expectation.” The paintings were featured in TV news coverage, and one of them became somewhat of a project icon, appearing in park service brochures and many newspapers including USA Today. More importantly, the National Park Service revised its proposal from all bus to rail-based. (As of this writing, the project is mired in politics along with a related proposal to expand services of the Grand Canyon railway, even though Amtrak did eventually establish a connection with the railway.)

The general lifespan of the Grand Canyon line, its support of community and landscape, and its erosion could be echoed in virtually every American passenger rail operation, with the exception of some commuter services. Even Amtrak’s skeletal system is at the mercy of transportation modernism, which hypes speed, individuality and the latest technology as “progress.”

So in our blind loyalty to modernism’s progress, we filed the passenger train, its art, its experiences and its message under “history”…and then quickly closed the file so we might get on to the next thing. Don Hudson, writing in Mars Hill Review, observes that, “modernism at its most extreme…ushers us down the exhausting path of subjectivism and nihilism because its critique of the past throws out the past.” 6 This was blatantly broadcast by a huge bill-board in Tacoma, touting a daily TV newscast: “At ten it’s news…at eleven it’s history.” Nothing must hinder our quest for progress, even history.

But there is far more at stake. In the haste and exhaustion of our quest, we also overlook the costs of transportation modernism to life and land. For example, every day some 120 Americans die in fatal highway accidents: roughly the number of passengers on a 737. The moment a plane goes down, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) mounts a major investigation, but we have grown callous to the highway death toll and simply lament the “accidents.”

We’ve paved over 60,000 square miles, nearly the area of Washington state, and every year an additional 3.2 million acres are covered. In 1997, Americans burned over 6.6 billion gallons of gasoline by sitting in traffic. The hidden costs of “free parking”—any parking area without a meter or required fee—annually run close to $85 billion. The statistics, including the less-quantifiable emotional and spiritual ones, are endless. We don’t want to acknowledge what’s lost because we have sold out to modernism’s promises.

Modernism’s haste has also driven a wedge between us and our land. Writing in Conde Nast Traveller, Clive Irving notes, “Americans are strangers to their own country in a way that no European can be. One reason is the demise of the American railroad.” 7 Our position of superiority is translated into a removed arrogance. “One cannot denigrate the expedience of America’s domestic airline network,” says Irving. However, “once man rose above the Alps in a balloon, all humility was lost and with it the capacity for awe.” 8 By only flying over our land we are indeed above it and have little desire to know it, nor learn what it might teach about life and history and responsibility.

In one of modernism’s unfortunate paradoxes, our arrogant affair with “progress” and visions of an alluring future actually immobilizes us in the present. Captivated with the promises of high tech trains “coming soon,” we delay action with what works right now. After all, we would not want to be accused of relying on “old technology.”

Columnists interview the visionaries, sweeping us up in their fervor. Studies are launched with fanfare, but nothing happens. As a friend of mine once said, “Gee, there’s no time for action, so let’s have another study!” Similar thinking prohibits a critical comparison of our transportation situations with those of Europe, where rail, as the preferred mode of transport, actively contributes to the stewardship of community and landscape.

Prohibited from looking to history for answers, and immobilized in the present by techno options, we look past what we see daily. We don’t read our traffic and highway incivility for what it really is. Despite the alluring ads for mini-vans and SUVs, the love affair with the auto is turning sour. Yet we only complain about traffic and road rage. On the rare occasion when we see a passenger train, we fail to ask what it could teach us.

Mention images of railroading and no one thinks of glorious paintings. Most people recall the graphic photos of derailed cars so liberally distributed after an accident. Some remember last year’s Christmas card image of a steam train chuffing merrily through snowy woods or a post card from a tourist railroad. Transport modernism has led us to this.

Does the postmodern era offer any opportunity for quantifiable transportation, and hence societal, change? Perhaps so. It begins in an ironic open-mindedness to the past. Gene Edward Veith notes, “From the historic preservation movement, to the nostalgia of popular culture with its TV reruns, historical fiction, and ‘retro’ fashions, contemporary people are fascinated and attracted to the past. Only a modernist would dismiss something because it is ‘old-fashioned.’” 9

When people speak nostalgically about railroads, it is for the experience of life associated with them, more than the trains themselves. A surprising article entitled “Train Time” by Susan Rich in Oregon Quarterly, published by the University of Oregon, put such an experiential perspective on the “Cascades” Talgo trains operating in the Portland - Seattle - Vancouver corridor. “Train travel… is a place to contemplate life rather than push against it, the journey a luxury for the spirit as much as for the body. Unlike the dejected bus atmosphere or the cold airplane stratosphere, the train trip inspires conversation, seats single passengers together in the dining car, encourages a mapping of the unexpected.” 10

This then, introduces a second characteristic of the postmodern era relevant to rail: an open-mindedness to community. Modernism’s rampant individualism has unquestionably led to incivility and the trashing of our cityscapes and landscapes. In pondering the chances of a return to civility, pundit James Howard Kunstler considers the physical design of our cities and towns. He observes, “It (civility) will certainly not be possible unless we restore that context, and I mean in bricks and mortar.” He’s right. Look at the positive effects of the new urbanism in creating parks, human scale urban vistas and even the proliferation of the neighborhood Starbucks.

However, we assume that the experience of “community” is static and have forgotten it can also be dynamic. When travel by train was the norm, we related to the members of our party and to other travelers as well over time and distance. We learned civility in those interactions. We met people at the station, perhaps invited them for refreshment in the lounge car. Dinner in the diner would follow. There was conversation with others in coach or Pullman sleeper.11

When passenger rail disappeared, we were so captivated with the auto’s privacy that we thought we only lost “that old train” as an outdated form of transport, and nothing else.

As long as transportation remains essentially individual, civility will suffer. If we hope to increase the experience of community, we will have to see that it is more than an event in a static setting. To experience the communal side of rail, we have to look beyond nostalgia and actually expect it to work in the present. Nostalgia assumes no serious connection between past success and present need. Here, clearly, is the irony. The passenger train, as a product of the industrial era, once taught us community; in a post-industrial setting, it can do it again.

So how do we restore passenger rail as this context of civility? The task is complicated, especially when the bulk of politics and business still adheres to the agendas of modernism, crumbling as they are, for modernism’s blinders reinforce predictability and keep us from seeing beyond the immediate tasks to connections and greater contexts. Of course there is public activism, the media, and the praise-and-push treatment when our elected officials make the right decisions. However, people are beginning to think and act “out of the modernist box” perhaps due to a postmodern open-mindedness to holism and systems.

An example of this is an awareness of rail as related to other disciplines. For example, in “Asphalt Nation” author Jane Holtz Kay12 discusses the problem of the financial dilemmas of the poor. Without reliable public transport, they are trapped. She quotes Michael T. Savage, deputy director of the Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Economic Development: “You have jobs over here. You have the community over there. Transportation is one of the overlooked arts in economic development.” Indeed it is.

I already mentioned the New Urbanism movement, which created the philosophical space for historic preservation as well as a rethinking the need for architecture to relate to human scale and need. Planners and politicians are recognizing rail as a means of connecting the redeveloped static expressions of community with a focus on transit oriented development (TOD). This is evidenced in The Returning City: Historic Preservation and Transit in the Age of Civic Revival, recently published by the Federal Transit Authority and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. I find it fascinating that in wildlife habitat recovery, ecologists talk about habitat connectivity, and the need to develop corridors between core reserves (specific areas undergoing restoration) as part of a whole restoration plan.13 The parallels are obvious.

Another recent development, yet to hit the media’s radar, is the almost meteoric rise of urban light rail and electric streetcar systems. Portland, Denver, Salt Lake, Sacramento and Dallas are just a few of the cities experiencing the financial and social benefits of rail. In spite of the naysayers, people are flocking to the rails. Minneapolis’ new Hiawatha service is experiencing double the pre-construction ridership forecasts. Some 70 cities are now lined up in a coalition supporting Oregon’s Congressman Earl Blumenauer’s legislation to streamline funding for streetcar systems, which enhance mobility and tread lightly on the landscape.

These urban trends are bound to effect regional and national transportation developments. There are a growing number of voices in today’s broader culture who address rail’s deeper message. Gilbert Carmichael, the former head of the Federal Railway Administration and current head of the Intermodal Transportation Institute in Denver, speaks convincingly about the threefold ethic of rail: economic, ecological and social.

Alfred Runte, mentioned above, wrote the popular “Trains of Discovery, Western Railroads and the National Parks” (4th edition, Roberts Rinehart, 1998) and related these rail themes to the preservation of national landscapes. His forthcoming volume “Allies of the Earth: Railroads and the Soul of Preservation” (Truman State University Press) deepens and updates the message.

Rail advocacy groups, such as the Washington Association of Rail Passengers, are shedding past labels as “train buffs” and with a new-found political sensitivity are helping reshape public policy. Think tanks, such as the Cascadia Center of Seattle’s Discovery Institute, are creatively setting these ideas and related images before the public.

Indeed, image is crucial. Landscape painters since the mid-nineteenth century have worried that, with the train, the machine was in the garden. Now with the turn to the twenty-first century, history is proving that the real nemesis of the land is the unrestrained auto. America’s railroads and electric interurban lines once celebrated landscape with images that included everything from promotional posters to fine art. Where, I ask, is the comparable art of the freeway? There is none, for there is nothing to celebrate.

“In Knights of the Brush, The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape” James F. Cooper notes that, “The arts are not merely a mirror reflecting social and cultural values, but are powerful forces that shape the way people live and behave. Indeed, the arts…are the means by which a people learn to see.” 14 Rail artists of the past, whether hired for private commission, an ad in Life Magazine or an annual report, visualized far more than technology in each piece—they depicted a responsibility, an opportunity, new perspectives and even a hope.

I maintain that even as rail has an unexpected place in the restoration of civility and a respect for landscape, rail art can unexpectedly once again help people to see, create vision and uplift the soul. It causes the viewer to ask, “What does this mean?” “What does this say about landscape and about people?” “What good is here?” “What values does this bring to culture?” In that capacity, rail art is far from nostalgic. In fact it is iconic, for the function of an icon, like an open door, is to cause us to question what lies on the other side and then go through. Nostalgia can never be so bold.

Roderick Nash, the celebrated environmentalist, notes that new ideas are first ridiculed, discussed, then accepted.15 In raising awareness of our responsibilities to the environment, he knows personally of what he speaks. Those of us tasked with the ironic interpretation of the passenger train as an institution for our time face a similar scenario. Contemporary culture may ridicule or ignore the passenger train, at least for the moment.

But the modern can only go so far. What it will take to move us into serious discussion and acceptance is yet unseen. Will it be a political, environmental, economic or worsening social crisis? Perhaps an unexpected opportunity? We do not know. Yet new leadership—showing boldness, vision and creativity—is happening upon the scene. I am sure that rail art, in its ironic and iconic juxtaposition of style and content, will add to the momentum for passenger trains to once again teach us the experience of life and land—beyond nostalgia. §

A longer version of this essay was published in issue #19 of Mars Hill Review, P.O. Box 10506, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-0506.