The Rock Island Line
It (was) a mighty good road.
A significant portion of my early childhood memories revolve around train watching excursions. My dad was a “railfan”, some might say a fairly obsessive one. He still is, for that matter. For the uninitiated, that means he likes to go to areas where you can observe train traffic, and to follow the routes of both freight and passenger rail lines. Sometimes the goal is taking photos of trains in scenic locations, but other times it’s just to have the experience. To watch them. It’s a hobby that often overlaps with model railroading, or building scale miniature train layouts. He’s into that too, in a big way.
When I was a kid this was a staple of our family leisure time: driving around the countryside, trying to intercept trains as they would pass key locations, and taking lots of photos. My dad shot slide film back in the day, and we’d have separate boxes of slides in the house: one for family pics, and one for trains. (The boxes were roughly equal in size.) We didn’t take extravagant family vacations, mainly because money was tight. But when we did travel together, it would be a driving trip, and inevitably it would be affected by (if not completely planned around) train watching opportunities. These trips took place in a 1970 Ford Econoline cargo van, which served as the only car for our family of five for the first many years of my life. Dad outfitted the empty van with some paneling and cabinets, as well as a couch. I think the van deserves an essay of its own, so let’s save those details for later.
Of course, like it would for any young kid, this seemed normal to me. It was only as I got older that I realized some might view it as unusual. There are common stereotypes associated with people who do this as a hobby, and it can be seen as sort of a nerdy thing for sure. There may have been times in my teenage years that I distanced myself from it a bit, but it’s so ingrained in my early development that it’s impossible for me to not love seeing a train. I still sometimes go out of my way to observe or photograph one if I’m near a rail line somewhere (I just did last week when I was on the road), even though other hobbies eventually became more important in my personal life. My older brother is more into it than I am, and he and my dad will still often take train-watching excursions on a weekend. He also has a model railroad setup in his basement, which is cool but…let’s just say pales in comparison to my dad’s layout.
Part of the attraction to me as an adult is that I’m interested in cars and trucks, and really any kind of transportation. So there’s a relationship there just in terms of appreciating mechanical things, but there’s also something visually fascinating to me in the liveries: the paint schemes and logos that evolve as railroads merge, especially ones where you can see a transitional state on a locomotive. Since we lived in Iowa, one of the railroads we saw all the time was the Rock Island, which is now long gone. In the ‘70s the RI was already in financial distress, having rebranded as “The Rock” for a while before eventually being swallowed up by the Chicago & Northwestern (which in turn was enveloped by Union Pacific). Many times we’d see a train that had one bright blue engine with fresh paint, followed by a couple others that had the old faded reddish brown/yellow scheme. Occasionally you’d even catch a quick & dirty refresh, where someone had just masked a small rectangular area and painted the new logo on an old rusty hulk. I don’t know exactly why but I loved that. It definitely influenced my taste in visual art as I got older and started making paintings and drawings (and especially collages) as part of my professional life.
One of my favorite examples of that seemingly chaotic branding happened in the late ‘60s when the Rock Island acquired or leased some locomotives from Union Pacific. Rather than repainting the large yellow engines, they saved money by simply adding the RI logo and covering up the old UP lettering. I’m including some of my dad’s old photos from that era, where you can see a wide variety of power units in downtown Des Moines. They’re all owned by Rock Island, but there are at least five different liveries on display: solid red, solid yellow, solid maroon, yellow/maroon, red/silver…it seems terrible in terms of “branding”, but it sure gave a casual viewer lots to look at. And of course if you built models of your favorite trains, you had new opportunities all the time to recreate many different paint schemes even if you only modeled one specific railroad.
I’m not sure exactly why I’m writing about this particular topic today, except that I’ve been completely engrossed in old photos lately. I have boxes and boxes of old pictures that have been holding my attention, and of course most of them are of people. People on both sides of my family, some of whom I remember and some I don’t. It’s a great way to spend time, and I’ve been scanning lots of them so they’ll be preserved in more than one state. Among all the human-centered photos, there are trains. Lots of trains. And it just makes me consider how significant that activity was in my early developmental years. If you asked me today what my most important hobbies or leisure activities are, I’d have a few answers. I’d talk about music, and working on old cars, and of course making art. I don’t think anything railroad-related would come up. But the truth is, I can see how there’s an undercurrent in all of it that comes from train watching. The visual elements are there in my artwork, the appreciation for car culture is closely related, and I’ve even written a couple songs that are informed by those experiences. It’s always in the background, just like any formative experience would be for any of us as we get older and dive into different activities.
Postscript: The pics with this essay (with one exception) were all taken by my dad between about 1968 and 1975. The aforementioned multicolored Rock Island E and F-units are in there, as well as a few that show our family van parked near the tracks. In that one at the very top of the article, that’s me standing on a desk with my hand on the window, watching a train go by. I’m pretty sure that was taken inside the Short Line Yard tower in Des Moines, and I’m equally sure that the guy manning the tower probably shouldn’t have let us in there. I’m sure any relevant statutes of limitation have long passed though. Also, the very last photo here is one I took last week in Shabbona, Illinois, for no real reason except that there was a train going by.
