Trains: the romantic / the squalid
and just a great way to get around
The old fashioned romance of rail travel is at its iconic best on overnight runs with table-clothed dining cars and sleeping compartments. Little can match lying in a berth as it rocks to the heartbeat-rumble of the tracks. But all-in-all, I prefer funky daylight local trains that travel slow enough to see the land and the backsides of towns, and that stop frequently enough to grab a glimpse life and a snack. This station in rural Thailand was a sleepy and charming place to hang until the train rolled in.
NYC subways have their own gritty romance — though less roncom than S&M. Like the above Chambers Street station, some appear to have hosted an apocalypse; others, an elite few, gleam white in tile and rider. But all the lines vibrate with energy and small dangers—of stepping on a rat (dead or alive … which is worse?), of entering the dread near-empty car and discovering why, or of being confronted by the deranged fellow passenger who seeks eye contact and spit-flecked confrontation. These are rare risks and mostly, New York subways are a great place for quiet, efficient travel followed by way too many stairs to climb.
And for the ultimate in railway magic, here’s Elizabeth Cotten:
and Thomas Hart Benton:
Trains are also the most energy efficient and environmentally clean way to travel, especially if powered by "green" electricity.
The last picture shows a steam locomotive and uses parallelogram distortion to imply forward speed. This effect had its origin in photography. The Graflex cameras of the early 20th century use a focal plane shutter whose slot sweeps downward from the top to the bottom of the film. Since the image is inverted, its bottom is exposed first and its top last. During that interval the subject has moved forward causing the perceived distortion. For a given scan rate the amount of distortion is proportional to the subject's speed. Artists and cartoonists soon adopted that effect to imply speed in the pictures they created.