Railroads hold a special fascination for me, often evoking strong and wonderful feelings about places and travel despite some dark environmental realities. I can vividly recall being thrilled at seeing a steam locomotive pulling a train on the Long Island Railroad when I was waiting at a grade crossing in the 1950's. I've hopped freight trains and ridden from coast-to-coast and on short trips many times. The Santa Fe railyard was next to my little adobe house in Albuquerque and sometimes I'd grab the twice daily coal train to LA and back, riding through the Mojave desert in comfort in one of the multiple (unoccupied) engines they needed to get over the mountains.
My first freight ride was out of Portland, heading back east to attend the Rhode Island School of Design as a freshman in the late summer of 1971. I'd been hitchiking and camping my way through the west and was told not to risk the Southern Pacific out of San Francisco because I'd get kicked off the train in Sparks, Nevada where they trained their yard bulls (RR police). Everyone said the Burlington Northern out of Portland was the road to ride so I headed that way.
Standing in the railyard not far from where I live now (and the engine in the painting above was idling recently), I tried to hide my purpose by sketching trains and asking a worker where I could find one facing east so the light would be right. Not that trains in a yard face their eventual destinations, but I was new at this. As he paused to think about which way east was, two dudes wandered up with full backpacks, folding lawn chairs and a case of beer. They asked him which track the hotshot to Interbay yard in Seattle was on, and he pointed and said they'd better hustle, because it had just finished being made up and it could leave any moment. They thanked him and beat feet in that direction, leaving me to figure out how to tell him not to bother with my question and to try and catch up to them. I stammered out something lame and jumped on as the cascading steel-on-steel bangs of the slack being taken up from all the couplings echoed down the line and the train began to roll out of the yard and onto the main line.
On another cross country trip some years later I climbed on the roof of a boxcar to shoot sets of stereo 3D slides for later use in my sculptures while the train raced across North Dakota at 70mph. Recently I proposed painting large single words on a series of new white railcars at the factory so they could be combined at random in the yards like the refrigerator poetry magnets to create rolling messages across the country. The railcar manufacturer liked the idea, but the time frame was too tight for it to be realized as part of the exhibition we were working on at the time.
If you look at early 1900's railway maps of the US, the density of mainlines and spurs is truly staggering, but only a tiny fraction are still in service today. I keep my eyes open whenever I'm near the tracks that remain to see what might be there, and every so often something perfect comes into view that turns into another painting...
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My work can be seen at the following galleries:
My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram