The Addendum "I tried to write shorter ~Mark Twain
route99west.com/addendum
is an occasional journal of Oregon, from arts and books to public policy & transportation.
All content © 2006- by Alexander B. Craghead, except where otherwise noted.
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Book Reviews
Review: Approaching Nowhere
Housekeeping Note
Review: The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs b...
Review: Here There Nowhere
The Ephemeral 'Net
Meet the G9
Portland Streetcar Obamamania
Bachelor's Special #1: Instant Noodles Review
Week in Review... in review.
Week in Review, Vol. XI
January 2005
July 2005
January 2006
February 2006
August 2006
September 2006
November 2006
January 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
July 2008
August 2008
September 2008
Other Notable Blogs
Cafe Unknown
Travel, History and Portland Oregon by Dan Haneckow
Jack Bog's Blog
By Jack Bogdanski of Portland, Oregon. (Like he needs any other introduction by now? -- A.B.C.)
For Portlanders Only
"Why buy a mattress anywhere else?"
Good Stuff NW
Featuring stuff that is good in the NW
LOST Magazine
LOST Magazine is an online monthly magazine that combines elements of many other literary, online, and national magazines with a singular mission--to reclaim in writing lost people, places, and things.
Mapes on Politics
Way West of the Beltway
Outside Is America
A journal about photography, roadtrips, trains and life, with occasional detours into movies, baseball, music, family and more.
The Photographers' Railroad Page
Good photos usually have good stories to go with them.... The goal of The Photographers' Railroad Page is to provide an outlet for top quality photographs and their story.
Portland Food & Drink
Throwing Ourselves on the Grenade of Bad Food to Save You
Portland Transport Blog
A Conversation About Access & Mobility in the Portland/Vancouver Region
PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media -- and booksellers
RailPixCritic
One person's musings on railroad photography, focusing on discussions of specific images or groups of same
Rambling West
The musings of a farmer with a typewriter and camera
Stumptown Confidential
Documenting Portland, Oregon architecture, history, and culture through photos, postcards, and words.
The Unauthorized Observer
Observations on faith, photography, trains, baseball, the city where I live (Fullerton, Calif.), anything that I find funny (a lot of things) or irritating (some things) and various incidents involving friends and family.
Under the Weather
...the open road, fatherhood, family life, music, railroads, photography, popular and unpopular culture, sex, violence, religion, the oppression of consumerism and capitalism and the general bullshit that makes up modern life.
Urban Planning Overlord
A blog to counter the myths, lies, and demagoguery others use against sound city planning to further their own ends, fair and foul - but also to urge the profession itself to pull back from the occasional wretched PC exces.
VanPortlander
Living in Vancouver; working in Portland. I have some thoughts.
Whiskey, Texas
...life and experiences in Texas and the Southwest. Recurring themes: Photography, railroads, fading ads / ghost signs, fallen-flag railroad logos, boxcars, bicycling, Texas music, pop culture, sports, road trips, literature, kids and family.
World Scott
The Travel Writing and Photography of Scott Lothes
Blegs & Bargains
Amazon Book Wishlist
B&H Wishlist
My eBay Listings
Powell's Books Wishlist
Saturday, July 5, 2008
The Ephemeral 'Net
I can still remember, as a child, my mother's big oaken desk. It was sturdy, if a little worn, with a black blotter top and drawers that were heavy and deep. It was always a cornucopia of sensations: sticky translucent yellow glue, a Swingline stapler in a very 1970s dusky pink, stamps with perforated edges from back in the day when you had to lick the backs to make them stick to anything. There were tons of multicolored pens lurking in the lap drawer, most dry and useless. There was almost always a bottle of ink, with an acrid, new-rain smell and a color somewhere south of violet and north of blue sky blue. When I think back to that desk it is no wonder that I became a nut about ephemera. Labels: Art, Design, History, Technology
The desk serves on today, but with slightly less pizazz. While it still holds checkbooks and postage and envelopes and the like, it also serves as a stand for a three year old iMac. I'm reminded of my own "desk" a bit, and the war that always goes on between the space my computer takes up and the space I need to spread out my eight-and-a-half-by-eleven redundant memory aides. (They used to call that paper in the 20th century.)
Earlier today I used my computer and the incredible power of the Internet for a very non-technical purpose: to find labels. You know the type: gum backed, with a little foil edge, the kind that used to go on the marbled covers of composition books, the kind that used to lurk n my mother's desk. I didn't find any, but much like when I go searching Wikipedia, I ended up making what a friend calls a "wiki-tree" of strange ephemeral goodness. Follow along, all you fellow paper geeks!
First up is Donovan Beeson, who makes various handmade stationery products and sells them on her Etsy page. Handmade envelopes, custom journals, shipping labels. All very cool stuff. Donovan also has a blog, Murmurs and Musings, which focuses naturally enough on the lost world of paper. While browsing through her archives, I found a post point towards sarcastic stationer 16 Sparrows, who had begun a campaign known as the "Letter Writer's Alliance". (You can buy LWA stationery here.) The LWA mission is, and I quote:"In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form; neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission. As a member of the Letter Writers Alliance, you will carry on the glorious cultural tradition of letter writing. You will take advantage of every opportunity to send tangible correspondence. Prepare your pen and paper, moisten your tongue, and get ready to write more letters!"
I always find it amusing to see the net used for these sorts of projects. Paper hasn't died, it's just become a fashion symbol! It's probably no surprise this kind of thing is up my alley, after all I do shop a Blue Moon Camera and Machine.
Another source for ephemeral goodness is PodPost. Sadly, their "Pod Post Mail Art Bento" is out of stock. Too bad, too, it combines all my love of ephemera and otakuness in one convenient bundle. Drat!
As I skipped along, I also ran into busynest cards. Busynest focuses on a very lost art -- the calling card. There's some really nice graphic design work here. These cards really do drive home the odd mixture the Internet has brought about: an out-of-date practice (calling cards) married to a very sleek and modern graphic design and sold worldwide over the 'Net. The 21st century is a strange place.
As for calling cards themselves? This page has the scoop on what they were and why. Interesting tidbits: a calling card doesn't include where you work, and includes your profession only if it gives you a title (M.D., General, etc...), as including your place of work or firm makes the card a business card, and therefore socially inappropriate to leave as a calling card:"it was considered to be in very poor taste to use a business card when making a social call. A business card, left with the servants, could imply that you had called to collect a bill."
Interestingly, what we consider today to be a business card -- flashy pictures, promotional saying, establishment name displayed prominently, and so forth -- was not at that time considered a business card at all, but a "trade card".
Now, where did I put my Fedora?
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Thursday, January 31, 2008
Review: Vanishing Point
Labels: Art, Book Reviews, History, Photography
David Plowden: Vanishing Point: Fifty Years of Photography
By David Plowden, forward by Richard Snow, introduction by Steve Edwards. W. W. Norton & Company, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110; http://www.wwnorton.com/; 11.3 x 12.5 in; hardbound; 340 pages, 237 b/w photos; $100.00
A trip to the photography section of a well-stocked bookstore will yield shelves full of photographer's monographs. Countless spines arrest the eyes, each one vying to be the stylish work that convinces you that this photographer is the American Master.
And then there is David Plowden.
Plowden is one of the few living links between today and the greats of documentarian photography, the geniuses of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others who participated in the Farm Services Administration's photography project during the Great Depression. Their work, seminal to the documentary style, was paradoxically emotive, evoking a minimalistic visual poetry. Plowden -- who struck up a friendship with Evans in the late '50s -- built upon this tradition, mixing a lyric style of photography with a documentary sensibility.
Over the course of his career, Plowden has published numerous books, almost always organized along topical lines: great lakes steam boats, great bridges of North America, vanishing small towns. He also has a fascination for railroads, the first love on which he lavished his camera -- indeed his first published photo was in TRAINS Magazine in 1954. This love expanded to encompass all manner of industrial subjects, from steamships and tugboats to steel mills and grain elevators. Now 76 years old, Plowden is at the end of his career, and it seems natural that he would publish a retrospective volume of his photography. Vanishing Point is that work.
The book opens -- after two images and a table of contents-- with a forward by Richard Snow, formerly the editor of American Heritage. Here Snow ably pens a brief discussion of Plowden's career. The brush strokes are light, and those familiar with Plowden's work might criticize it as being repetitive or unnecessary, but it provides a valuable taste of the text and photos to follow, almost as if it were a kind of abstract of the remaining book. A gentle start: so far, so good.
All this changes changes with the turn of the page and a remarkable 14-page introductory essay by Steve Edwards. Edwards brings his journalist sensibilities to the fore as he spins the story of the life and career of David Plowden. In so many ways, the story the journalist tells seems almost cinematic: a troubled childhood in New England, a youth amongst railroad men, a struggle to study a discipline he hated (economics) at Yale in hopes of making himself a better railroad employee following graduation. The reader is treated to the full transit of the photographer's disillusionment with the railroad world and with more common paths of life that would eventually bring him to photography. And here he works for Winston Link, studies under Minor White, and becomes fast friends with Walker Evans.
Edward's portrait is deftly penned with a light touch and a sensitivity to emotions and motives that makes the reader feel they can get inside -- if only for a brief moment -- the heart and mind of the photographer. He is sympathetic, but candid too; Plowden's single-minded devotion to his art often came at the expense of a relationship with his children and eventually cost him his first marriage. The event is part of a repeating pattern of loss that seems endemic to Plowden's drive. Edwards relates a point in 1960, after Plowden had left the studio of Minor White, feeling he had made a great mistake to study photography. The scene is rural Maine, and the photographer is standing the the cab of a steam locomotive on the very last steam-powered run on the line."'While that engine died, I sat in the cab in Brownsville Junction and watched the gauge drop to zero,' [Plowden] says. The loss was palpable; the very thing that had provided so much joy and escape during his troubled childhood had vanished."
In the space of a few short sentences, Edwards gets to the burning core of Plowden's modus operandi.
After this come the photographs themselves. Plowden was once scoffed at for being a "topical" photographer; here he wears this on his sleeve, dividing the book into seven thematic chapters of plates. Each is designated by only a roman numeral, with no title, no explanatory text, no attempt at interpretation. It is only the chapter divider, the plates, and in tiny text at the bottom, a plate number and very cursory caption.
Although railroads were Plowden's first love, they are not the focus of the work, and indeed the images of railroads he presents here are not the strongest images in the book. The most amusing thing about these images is the first plate, a photo of a Great Northern steam-powered freight near Wilmar, Minnesota: it violates nearly every rule of railroad photography convention, with no light on the nose of the locomotive, a broad foreground space of snow and haphazard weeds, and a line of poles and wires directly in front of the engine!
In addition to the train-centric images are more domestic moments, with the engines getting washed, maintained, and fueled by engine terminal crews. These images display a cinematic quality that is similar to Link, and indeed many of the plates date from 1959-1960, around the time of Plowden's association with that famous photographic dramatist. There is, however, one key element that is notably different; while Link resorted to everything short of building a personal hydrogen-powered sun to light his subjects with Hitchcockian precision, Plowden has worked only with available light. The result? His images seem fresher and more natural than Link's, as if the events in them had taken place but a few days ago, rather than decades hence.
Far more stunning than the railroad plates are the nautical images, such as plate 31, "Tugboat Julia C. Moran Undocking Liner, Hudson River, New York City (1975)". We are on the forward deck of a Hudson tug, barely seeing more than a few inches of the con. Out forward is a single man -- one of the few humans that Plowden has included in his Hopperesque de-peopled world -- unwrapping one of the ropes that holds the liner to the tug. And behind hims soars the great silver rivet-speckled bow of the hull of an ocean liner, so massive that her decks and superstructure are lost somewhere in an Olympian height beyond the view of the camera.
Bridges are, of course, one of David Plowden's greatest loves, and with boyish glee he gives us great hulking massive flying piles of steel. My favorite is probably one of the closest to me, an image of Newport, Oregon's Yaquina Bay Bridge shown in plate 61. The photo looks down the empty length of the span, and flanked between two gothic concrete spires curves the steel arch of the main bridge. The top nearly disappears into coastal fog, and the far end is barely even there at all. Beyond, there is no world, no ocean, no hills.
Next comes a chapter on industrial subjects, lead by a large set of photographs of the steel making process. Giant metal buckets, glowing molten steel, flashing dancing sparks. After a tour of this mechanical Hades, Plowden takes us on a journey through a litany of "back end" jobs, a hidden world of industry and commerce that few get to see. We see the great ore docks. We meet the solitary men who work in the bellies of steamships. We walk among lunar piles of coal and of iron ore. We get lost amongst the clinical inhumanity of a nuclear power plant.
The fifth chapter could be best described as wastelands. The images here are perhaps the most complex and most postmodern of the book. This America is one that is decaying, where every house hasn't been painted since FDR was president and each car looks like only Richard Roundtree would want to drive it, if it were still 1975 anyway. The bleakness, the desolation, the emptiness here is almost disturbing. Every now and then, I catch a sensation that reminds me of the empty highway-spaces of Jeff Brouws. There is a vague notion of social commentary emerging here, especially in the few plates here that show people; what is the future of the freckle-faced boy from rural West Virginia in plate 132? What kind of life awaits the girl staring out the window in plate 136? The state of paint and repair of her Pennsylvania home doesn't give much hope of stewardship for the world she is about to inherit. And in plate 143, shot in 1967, even the iconic form of the Statue of Liberty is framed by power poles and trash.
Love re-enters the picture in chapter six. Here is rural America, and rural Americana: the small town main street, the general store, the hardware store. This is the world that is fast fleeting, a victim of a rural populace mystified at the decline of tradition and Main Street while they push their shopping carts down the aisles of Wal-Mart. The shop-keepers -- when they appear at all -- are old, their faces as cracked as the paint of their wooden floorboards. And now and then we get children, too, and an old couple in Iowa who keep a clapboard house with Swiss net curtains, and we get the silence of over-furnished empty front parlors from houses that were built when people knew what the heck the word "parlor" even meant.
Storm clouds on the plains of New Mexico opens up the seventh and final chapter of Vanishing Point. It is the same image that is used on the dust jacket, a powerful, sweeping metaphor for the elegy that is the remainder of the book. From here out, there will be no more people, not a single solitary one. Indeed the only identifiable living creature is a single horse -- pale like that ridden by Death in the Four Horseman of the Book of Revelations. It stares out at us kindly from a single small square window in the side of a barn in plate 221. We are alone now, in the plains, navigating by grain elevators. We walk freely amongst barns and inside of feed mills. It seems that dust still hangs in the air, as if someone was just here, just working, but where have they gone? There is a profound solemnity, as if in church, and each successive image shows us less and tells us more.
The final image -- plate 235 -- returns us back to where we and Plowden both began. It is a railroad track. Frost once wrote of two roads that diverged in a wood, one well taken, and one rarely so. Plowden, like the poet, took the one "less travelled by". Here, though, we see the mainline -- the path well worn -- and the diverging route merging towards a switch that unites them. Are we looking backwards from the diverging route of Plowden's life, to see what has gone now collectively behind us? Or are we looking ahead, and seeing that even the route less taken eventually winds to the same common end? Take care and note: there are no buildings. There are no people. There is not even a train. There is only a track that crests over a small rise and disappears, and beyond that, empty hills bearing no promises. It is an evocative image on which to end the collection of photographic plates, especially considering that the book is meant as a retrospective of an entire career.
The closing text of the work is from Plowden himself, and his voice crackles with energy. Here he is full of humor and wit, buoyant in a way that is natural to those who have such a keen sense of loss and of the fleeting nature of time. Here we are imbued in a world of technical geekdom but told in such a loving fashion that, like the sometimes nonsensical phrasing of a T.S. Elliot poem, the reader is enthralled. He tells a hilarious narrative of his bad luck in camera choices, contraptions that seemed bent on being too bulky, too complicated, or too delicate to stand up to the demands he would place on them. The notes read like a letter from a favorite grandfather that you rarely see. It is perhaps the most valuable text in the book, and as precious as any of the photographic plates bound within the book's pages.
This is a heavy book, weighing in at over five pounds. The binding is stout but never gets in the way of viewing the photographic plates, even in the middle of this thick volume. The paper is strong and bright and feels good under the hand. Reproduction on the photos is outstanding with fine tonal range. The design work on the book tends towards minimalist, with subtle tones, simple font choices, and bold charcoal-hued chapter dividers bearing stark roman numerals and nothing more. All the plates are produced in a nearly full-page format, with white margins neither distractingly thin nor drastically wide. Image grouping is carefully planned; where images face each other across pages (which is most of the time), the images act as a kind of diptych, reflecting some common graphic value or subject theme, while images that are strongest on their own are displayed solitary against a blank page. The book looks and feels like every penny of its $100 price.
Vanishing Point is a monumental volume befitting the lifetime's work of one of America's greatest photographers. There is no question that this is one of the finest books I have had the pleasure of adding to my collection in years. It is a shame that some in the world of high art have derided Plowden as a "topical" artist. For every avant-guard photographer the art schools crank out, few will ever achieve the richness and depth of the American soul that David Plowden has. His work stands alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the literature of Mark Twain as essential to understanding the uniqueness of American culture. With an outstanding introduction, a collection of stunning plates, and a precious gem of an afterward from Plowden himself, Vanishing Point proves itself the definitive work of Plowden's life. No serious photographer of American culture should be without it. Photography books this fine are rarely printed en-masse; when this book finally sells out, it will likely begin to appreciate in price steadily. Buy it while it's new, before you have to pay twice as much for a used copy.
Vanishing Point is available from Amazon or Powell's.
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Thursday, January 17, 2008
Week in Review, Vol. VI
Okay, what is this? Is the Willamette Week taking a page from the Onion? If so, can't hurt. Labels: Blogging, Civics, History, Media, Photography, Portland, Portland History, Public Policy, Site News, Transportation, Week in Review
While you're there, check out this acerbic piece by Corey Pein. I don't think I've read as entertaining of a summing-up of the Portland political landscape in a while. Informative while hilarious; well done.
And while we're on Portland subjects, just a brief note that quid pro quo is alive and well.
Tuesday, the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission released their report to Congress containing recommendations on future surface transportation policy."The Commission is working to examine not only the condition and future needs of the nation's surface transportation system, but also short and long-term alternatives to replace or supplement the fuel tax as the principal revenue source to support the Highway Trust Fund over the next 30 years."
Since the report was released only two days ago, I have yet to open it much less digest it. Regarding the production of the report, a source of mine wrote:"...all work was done by or for US-DOT directly. I reported to Susan Binder, executive director of the Commission and deputy secretary of USDOT. She reports to Mary Peters, [Secretary] of US-DOT who reports to George W. Bush who probably doesn’t know or care what we are doing. But I am in the fourth layer down from The Top. This is the highest I have ever been or am ever likely to be."
It will be interesting to see what exactly the report -- called for in 2005's transportation funding bill -- consists of, much less recommends. Apparently one of the recommendations is a $0.40 hike in the Federal gas tax, something that Portland Transport reports isn't going down well with the administration. I'll take a look at the report later this week, and will likely have some thoughts.
While researching obscure Cuban cocktails I located (via this article) a cool little publication called Lost."LOST Magazine is an online monthly magazine that combines elements of many other literary, online, and national magazines with a singular mission--to reclaim in writing lost people, places, and things."
For lovers of history, nostalgia junkies, as well as obsessive collectors of obscure trivia, it's a really cool site. Lost is a welcome addition to our blogroll. Check it out.
Speaking of lost things and blogrolls, I stumbled onto this cool site this week. Sleek design, neat concept, great content, luscious photos. Sadly, it's not updated anymore. As a former boss of mine used to say, "drat".
All the blog overload has lead me to try out an RSS reader. No Safari has one built in, but all the geeky types are using standalone RSS Readers. With an overload of blogs to keep up with, I thought, hey, why not try this out? So lately I've been trying a few, and I've found my favorite so far, an app called Vienna. It's sleek, so far it doesn't hiccup too much, and on an added note I can view web pages directly in it rather than opening a browser. (It uses the Safari architecture to power a simple browser function).
While we're discussing blogs, here's one more "best images of 2007" post, this one on Elrond Lawrence's Outside is America. Nice stuff, El.
Keep Portland Weird may be an understatement on this one: it was No Pants on MAX Day on Saturday.
What's worse? Hockley has photos. Click if you dare.
How about a blast from the past to clean those images off the insides of your eyelids? Stumptown Confidential has Portland circa 1964, and Dan Haneckow has a farewell to Nick's Famous Coney Island.
Nick's reminds me a bit of the pictures of the original Camp Washington Chili in Cincinatti. Camp Washington modernized in the last decade or so; Nick's stayed blessedly old school and blessedly Portland.
Alas, no more. Wonder if it will be condos, or apartments?
More Portland news: Friday the city will be putting on a press event celebrating the 50th anniversary of... parking enforcement?"(PORTLAND, OR) -- The City of Portland Office of Transportation's Parking Enforcement Division will celebrate its 50th anniversary on Friday, January 18, 2008. The media are invited to attend this special event that includes an entertaining slide show presentation on the history of parking enforcement in Portland."
What next? Can we have a 100th anniversary of indoor plumbing event?
Rolling Stone brings us this story about the decline in audio recording quality.
I'm from the mp3 generation and love their flexibility and portability. That said, vinyl is way better than anything you can hear these days. Once more its a case of modern digital technology replacing a superior analog one. Mass production always has more upsides than downsides, but it's always a loss in quality too.
A few additions to the blogroll this week:For Portlanders Only;
Good stuff all.
Elrond Lawrence's Outside Is America;
Kevin Scanlon's The Photographers' Railroad Page;
Martin Burwash's Rambling West;
Dave Styffe's The Unauthorized Observer;
Scott Lothes' World Scott.
I'm confused. Is this a promotion for a new form of mass transit, or a statement in favor of private automobile commuting?
Last up, a bit of sound advice from the Powell's blog. I may be following it myself more in the future.
Until later, folks.
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Friday, December 7, 2007
Pearl Harbor
I shouldn't let this date slip by without noting that today is the 66th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. On a Sunday morning in 1941, aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy launched an attack on U.S. forces in Pearl Harbor, on Oahu. The attack brought the United States into World War Two. Labels: History
I'm sure a lot of blogs will be noting this anniversary, and in greater depth than I. I do, however, have a personal connection to the event. My grandfather, Ed Johann, was a firsthand participant, having been aboard the hospital ship U.S.S. Solace during the attack. He helped to remove survivors off the stricken U.S.S. Arizona.
After 66 years, we have fewer and fewer survivors of the attack. We are about as distant from Pearl Harbor today as the sailors of 1941 were from the Battle of Little Bighorn.
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Monday, November 6, 2006
Review: Logging Railroads of Weyerhaeuser's Vail-McDonald Operation
Labels: Book Reviews, History, New Books, Railroads, Transportation
Logging Railroads of Weyerhaeuser's Vail-McDonald Operation
By Frank W. Telewski & Scott D. Barrett. Oso Publishing Company, P.O. Box 1249, Hamilton, MT 59840; www.osorail.com; 9 x 11.5 in; hardcover; 354 pages, 371 b/w photos, 10 illustrations, 65 maps; $49.95
Logging railroads seem like a thing of the distant past. Mention them to someone and most won't even know what you are talking about, but the few who do will probably conjure up images of teakettle steam engines hauling Paul Bunyan sized logs down tracks in some range of mountains that might have come off of a backdrop for the TV show Bonanza. Few realize that logging railroads survived well past the Second World War, or in the case of Washington State, even until today.
One of the last and biggest log roads in Washington State was Weyerhaueser's Chehalis Western. Having taken over the Milwaukee Road's branches south of Tacoma in 1980, this line ran large log trains from Chehalis to the port of Tacoma -- behind the last GP38-2's built by General Motors' Electro-Motive Division -- until 1992. With the publication of the lengthily titled Logging Railroads of Weyerhaeuser's Vail-McDonald Operation, there is finally a work that tells the story of this line, and its adjacent feeders, the Vail branch, and the Curtis Milburn & Eastern, starting in 1924 and running through to 1995.
This book is printed in a large hardback format identical to many college textbooks, and indeed it carries a feel of a textbook history inside as well. Reproduction of the numerous black-and-white photos is top notch, and many maps are also included. The work is organized into thirteen chapters and includes numerous technical appendices, which reflects its highly specialized subject matter.
The content overall is solid. One could wish for a more up-to-date final chapter from a book so freshly published, but as well researched and lavishly illustrated as the book is, this hardly is a critical flaw. Today, what remains of the line is primarily operated by Tacoma Rail, and plays host to tourist railroads Mount Rainier Scenic, and Chehalis-Centralia, and this book has become a must have for many of their employees. Fans of the Chehalis Western, the Milwaukee Road, or today's shortlines south of Puget Sound would also enjoy this book.
Logging Railroads of Weyerhaeuser's Vail-McDonald Operation is available occasionally from Amazon as well as directly from the publisher.
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Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Review: Leaders Count
Labels: Book Reviews, History, New Books, Railroads, Transportation
Leaders Count: The Story of the BNSF Railway
By Larry Kaufman. Texas A&M University Press, John H. Lindsey Building, Lewis Street, 4354 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-4354; http://www.tamu.edu/upress/; 9.1 x 6.1 in; trade paperback; 384 pages,; $14.95
Once upon a time, there were dozens of so-called "class one" railroads across the American continent, wielding massive political power and reshaping the nation. Today, most of those companies are gone, thanks to a corporate consolidation craze that began prior to World War One and continues today. In the 21st century American west, there are now only two major railroads: Union Pacific, and the BNSF Railway. Leaders Count is the "official" corporate history of BNSF, published under contract by them and distributed by Texas A&M University.
The book divides into roughly three sections. The first deals with the history of the BN heritage companies through the 19th and early 20th centuries. The second portion deals with regulation, the forces leading up to the BN merger, and the early BN period. The last segment covers the BNSF railway, from formation through to the present.
The book has a reputation of being a hard hitting self-examination of the company, it's successes, and it's mistakes. By-and-large, Kaufman does a decent job of telling the corporate history, but from the beginning there is an undercurrent of BNSF and its heritage roads being on the side of angels, and rival companies such as Union Pacific (UP) being less than stellar. While there is some truth to UP having a greater number of scandals in its past, BNSF's heritage companies were hardly innocent either, especially the Northern Pacific.
Minor factual errors in the book make me question how much primary source research Kaufman actually did. Another example of his lack of deep research is his knee-jerk acceptance of conventional wisdom, especially regarding the demise of the Milwaukee's Pacific Extension.
The segments dealing with regulation tend to be wonkish, but the segments regarding the creation of BNSF predecessor Burlington Northern are as good as anything I've seen in print on the subject yet. The newer portions of the book cover the creation of BNSF well, but tend to gloss over differences between BNSF previous leaders such as Rob Krebs and Gerald Grinstein. It's clear this is the sanitized version of BNSF, told from a board room perspective, and meant not to offend anyone still around.
Kaufman closes his epilogue with text about BNSF today, sounding much like a company press release. While there's a lot of value to his final analysis of the future, you can't help but feel that it's not an unbiased view, despite his claim in the preface that the company had never exerted the slightest influence on what he wrote.
Why was this book written? About half-way through, it occurred to me that the book in many was resembles a text-book; I wonder if the company uses it in their Management Training Program? Leaders Count is printed in trade-paperback form, the same rough dimensions most Bibles are published in. Indeed there are two versions: a plain cover versions issued in 2003 -- likely largely used internally by the company -- and a version sold to the public with a photo cover. One wonders if there is also a red letter edition.
Leaders Count is certainly not unbiased, nor does it live up to it's reputation as a truly critical self-examination of company policy and leadership issues. That said, the book is probably the most concise corporate history on BNSF and it's predecessors. For anyone who wants to have one, comprehensive history text on these companies, this is it, and with used BNSF issued copies in paperback for about $5 a pop, it's a steal. Just be prepared to read; this is no picture book and it's no pulp novel either.
Leaders Count is available from Amazon. and from Powell's Books.
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Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Review: The Men Who Loved Trains
Labels: Book Reviews, History, New Books, Public Policy, Railroads, Transportation
The Men Who Loved Trains: The Story of Men Who Battled Greed to Save an Ailing Industry
By Rush Loving Jr. Indiana University Press, 601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, IN 47404-3797; http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/; 9.3 x 6.2 in; hardbound; 360 pages; $27.95
Penn Central. To this day, the name of this corporation sends shudders through the world of finance. When it went bankrupt in June of 1970, it was the largest bankruptcy in United States history, and it held that title for the next thirty-one years. (It took the collapse of Enron in 2001 to supplant it). In The Men Who Loved Trains, journalist Rush loving tells the story of how Penn Central came into being, but even more importantly how a few men picked up the pieces afterward and pulled the railroad industry out of a tailspin that might have proved fatal.
Loving's work is essentially a journalistic book, rather than a scholarly one. It is written in a prose style and has an eminently readable pacing. Yet don't take this for being lightweight; that the author can weave such an unwieldy mess into a fast and cohesive narrative is a testament to his abilities as a writer. In ways, the book follows in the tradition of works such as Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.
The story line follows the chronology of the demise of Penn Central, the struggle to pick up the pieces, and the creation, life, and eventual parting out of PC's successor, Conrail. Throughout the work we meet various key individuals; from the fiery Alfred Perlman to former CSX Transportation executive (and future Treasury Secretary) John Snow. Along the way, we come back again and again to John McClellan, tracking his career from entry level PC staffer through to planner for the Department of Transportation and eventually strategic advisory for Norfolk Southern. His career serves as a foil for the events of Conrail's life and death, humanizing a story of corporate battle and macro economics.
And what a story it is! Following the collapse of PC, many pundits were predicting doom for the entire railroad industry. The more optimistic felt that the Northeast lived behind a wall in which railroad transportation simply would never pencil out. Although a government takeover of PC would help keep the trains running, many in the private sector feared it as a dangerous first step towards nationalization. In the end, a select few fought an uphill battle for the creation first of passenger carrier Amtrak, and then of the freight railroad what would come to be known as Conrail.
Like Amtrak, Conrail has a belabored existence for much of its life. It inherited a property that was severely overextended and under-maintained. Only great gobs of public money could solve Conrail's problems, and even then there was no real guarantee it would turn the company around. Throughout its existence, philosophical and political opponents watched and salivated as they waited for the company to trip and fall.
As Loving tells, however, Conrail endured, returning to black ink, and eventually becoming a publicly traded, private sector corporation. Loving tells, too, of the irony that was the end of Conrail; the company became the subject of a bidding war between NS and CSXT, and was finally split between them in 1997, redrawing the Northeastern railroad map along lines that were eerily similar to what Al Perlman had wanted before he was forced into agreeing with the PC merger.
The book attempts to carry the story without bias, in the best journalistic fashion, and most of the time succeeds in doing so. There is, however, a distinct bias in favor of McClellan's employer, NS, and the between-the-lines feeling is that Loving and McClellan are friends. Still, Loving remains remarkable professional, remaining gentlemanly even when dealing with McClellan's arch-rival Snow.
Conrail was arguably the nation's most controversial modern railroad project. The Men Who Loved Trains tells an important tale of railroading, corporate intrigue, and a thousand might-have-beens that make it one of the hallmark railroad history books about the late 20th century, of importance not just to scholars of Northeastern and Midwestern railroad history, but to anyone with an interest in railroads, the politics of transportation, or public policy.
The Men Who Loved Trains is available from Amazon, Powell's, and directly from the publisher.
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Friday, July 1, 2005
Review: Westsider
Labels: Book Reviews, History, New Books, Portland History, Railroads, Transportation
Westsider: A Story of the Southern Pacific Portland Division Westside Line
By Dan Rehwalt. Grizzly Press, 76470 High Street, Oakridge, OR 97463; 5.25 x 8.25 in; trade paperback; 88 pages, 43 b/w photos, illustrations, and maps; $12.95
The trade paperback memoir is probably one of the most ubiquitous of books in small communities. A good percentage of retirees tend to think themselves ten-cent Hemingways, and thanks to cheap modern printing technology, they can realize their dream of being an author. Few of these books merit the attention of larger presses, but many of them prove to be solid if not brilliant reading. They are the literary equivalent of the stories told beside campfires, over cups of coffee with the boys, or with a few beers at the end of a long day. They are as common -- and as American -- as roadside diners. Dan Rehwalt has been publishing a number of these style of books in the last few years, telling the story of working for the Southern Pacific Railroad's Oregon Division in the '50s, '60s, and '70s.
Westisder, published in 2004, is my favorite among them. This fairly slim volume contains a series of short stories of Rehwalt's past on the railroad, this time focusing on the vast "Westside" branch network that SP ran in the Willamette Valley. Rehwalt writes a clean, straightforward prose in first person; his choice to confine this volume solely to his own stories and none from anyone else helps give the work a more intimate air. For railfans and Portland history buffs, the rarest gem is a chapter devoted to operating on the Jefferson Street line, presently the Willamette Shore Trolly line and one of the least documented of SP's feeders in the state.
The books has a format familiar to fans of this type of volume; lots of text supported by a few maps and photos reproduced to the best quality a photocopier can provide. But this is not a book you buy for photos, and while basic or even crude at times, the photos provide enough context for those unfamiliar with the territory being discussed. For the price, there can be no complaining; the real value is in the text.
As a book of railroad related stories, Westsider does have a limited audience. It should, however, find a welcome place on the shelf of any fan of Oregon railroad history as well as Portland historians. Additionally, most of the routes in the book are now operated by regional Portland & Western, and this book has become a must have for both students of operations these lines, as well as employees of the company.
Westsider is currently available from Karen's Books.
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