Some Trains in America

Rating:
Summary: Workin' on the railroad.
Review: The first thing you'll notice about this book is the shape, just over twelve inches wide by six and a half deep, just the right landscape size to show very long freight trains. This is not really a book for train fans though, photographers like the brilliant Greg McDonnell, Gary Benson or Gary Dolzall have produced much better train imagery but Andrew Cross uses freights to say something about the American landscape, the German photographer Lothar Baumgarten approached the subject in much the same way in his excellent book 'Carbon'

Most of the photos have part of a train in them, some are just of tracks in the country or suburbia. The seven sections cover southern California, Texas, Appalachia, Northeast, Midwest, Northwest and finally central California. I think the best photos are the ones taken in the west with an empty prairie where you can see six (or sometimes ten) diesels pulling a mile and a half long consist, either boxcars, trailer-on-flat-cars or monster unit coal trains. The section on central California is interesting because Cross shows the area around Tehachapi Loop (but unfortunately not the Loop itself, where freights circle and go over themselves) and the trains seem to merge into the landscape, even the eye dazzling Santa Fe's or the yellow Union Pacific diesels. Overall an interesting collection of photos that support the photographer's point that freight trains are an everyday part of the American scene.

The production of the book is worth commenting on, the shape is fine but the typography is rather quirky, the page numbers are presented as four numerals, 0084 or 0140 and the first page of the seven sections has the number filling the whole left hand page, the captions use arrows to show which photos they apply to even when the photo is on the next page. All this is a bit of designer whimsy and not really necessary in my view.