Recently I had the pleasure of taking the train from Washington, D.C., near where I live, to Denver, where my brother and nephew have their families. My trip consisted of two segments. The first, from Washington Union Station to Chicago’s station of the same name, was on the Floridian, a train originating in Florida that runs up the east coast before turning westward toward Chicago. It connects Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, and several smaller cities along its way. The second leg of my journey was on the California Zephyr. This train begins its westward route in Chicago, passes through Iowa and Nebraska en route to Denver. From there it passes through the Rockies’ spectacular scenery, bound for the west coast.
For privacy and comfort, I booked a small cabin called a roomette. Roomettes feature two facing seats in a small compartment that can be made up into a sleeping compartment by the porter, if one so desires. I did not. I preferred to sit up late, reading, writing, and tapping away on my laptop in between frequent gazes out the window at the passing countryside.
The view of America one gets from a train differs from that seen from the highway. From a train, one sees not front yards but back yards, often scenes meant to be hidden rather than proudly displayed up front. A great many things present themselves out the train’s windows. Crossing Illinois and the Great Plains one passes seemingly endless farmland and scattered farmsteads but also the backsides of factories, the stuff of everyday life, people engaged in normal activity, and piles of junk that represent civilization’s detritus. Roads terminate at the edge of the tracks, trains speed by with an unsettling roar, and red lights flash at crossings; there are endless crossings. Faintly heard are clanging bells at crossing gates and the locomotive’s mournful call as it approaches yet another crossing.
My trip included several especially notable sights. As the train crossed from Illinois to Iowa, we of course passed over the wide and muddy Mississippi River, empty save for one small craft visible a long way downstream. In Colorado, I sighted a feedlot. Feedlots are common in the Midwest. But the one I saw was special; it held what appeared to be several hundred American bison, apparently being “beefed up” for eventual consumption as bison burgers. A special nighttime treat was a full moon high in the dark sky, easily visible out the south-facing window in the upper level of my sleeping car.
Intriguing as watching was, the photographer in me soon yielded to the temptation to pull my camera from its bag and shoot out the window. I soon found myself glued to the window and abandoned my book and writing for the joy of capturing passing scenes.
Photographing from a moving train faces several obstacles. First, the window from which I shot was, while largely clear, coated with a thin layer of accumulated grime. Serious photographers are careful to shoot with lenses that are pristine and know that even small particles of dust affect picture quality. The grimy window virtually guaranteed that my shots would fail to meet high standards of quality.
Then there is the basic fact that the train is not stationary. While at times it slowed and stood still when in a station, it more often speeded through the countryside at speeds that bested those of cars on the Interstate. And it bounced. It swayed left and right, gently on corners as the rails led leftward or rightward. But often, the train passed over crossing points, switches from one track to another, and these brought on a jerking, sometimes sudden, along with the sound of clickety-clacks. The best photographs are made with the camera solidly held in an immobile position. Such conditions do not exist when shooting from a train.
Because of the way physics works, subjects in the close-up foreground swish past the train almost too fast to see, while those in the distant background seem to be motionless. This means that foreground objects will likely be blurry even as distant object appear sharp.
As a photographer, I know some workarounds for these obstacles. I set my camera for a high shutter speed, 1/8000 second, to freeze as much motion as possible. I “opened up” the lens’s diaphragm to let in as much light as possible and set the ISO, the camera’s light-gathering capacity, to a high number. I focused manually and set the focus to a middle distance, knowing I’d have no time to shift the focus as quickly changing scenes sped by my window.
But making these choices implies tradeoffs in picture quality. The high ISO setting meant that my pictures would contain more electronic “noise” and thus be less sharp. Opening up the lens meant my images would have little depth of field, so that my pictures would be sharp at the point of focus, but softer elsewhere. The smeary window guaranteed that every image I made would be soft. For the sake of recording a bit of my journey, I elected to accept these tradeoffs.
The resulting photos, some of which are shown here, document a part of my travel experience and are part of a search for deeper meaning in what I saw, felt, and heard as I crossed a large part of our vast continent. The images reflect the joy of traveling by a means that permits the voyager to actually see the things he or she is passing, rather than being captured like a filet of canned herring pressed into a sterile and passionless tube. Thank you, Amtrak.