Engines of Culture

Did you read about Engines of Culture in Take Shape magazine? We want to hear from you. Please get in touch at danya.sherman (at) gmail if you want to brainstorm creative solutions to transit inequity, have ideas for a future route for the train, or just want to talk shop. If you want to submit a drawing of a future route, protest idea, or anything else, please include them and I’ll post the work here if you’d like. With justice and mobility for all!

Trains are complex metaphors for many things – modernity, industrialism, corporate power, oppression – and also for liberation. A friend sent me this memento recently, sharing that his grandmother had fled Nazi-occupied Lithuania via the Trans-Siberian railroad (thanks to Dutch and Japanese consuls, who helped 2,100 Jews). Fascinating to imagine what that journey was like. 

Likewise, American trains have been sites of liberation and exclusion since their birth. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns and John Giggie’s After Redemption discuss the train as an escape from the Jim Crow South for six million African Americans over the course of the 20th century. But of course, the trains themselves were segregated, both in the north and the south. Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad re-imagines the freedom network as a literal railroad and site of spiritual deliverance.

The thoughtful and energetic folks on this journey with me come from all over the world (most are from around America but we also have Fulbright scholars from Dubai, Togo, Nepal, and Mexico). Our projects range from education to youth experiencing homelessness to public art and so much more. It’s fascinating to be spending time in three private rail cars together, and by the third day we’re starting to get to know each other and have more intense and helpful conversations about each other, our work, and the pertinent issues of our time. I love that most people’s projects are about having a positive impact for others, unlike other accelerators which are focused on building financially successful businesses – and this creates specific needs for developing our work.

Thanks to support from family & friends and the Transit Center, I will be on board the traveling project incubator called the Millennial Trains Project this August! I’ll be blogging regularly with updates as I seek to develop prototypes and support for democratic cultural activity on, around, and inspired by trains & advocate for better transit infrastructure.

The photographer McNair Evans has an exhibition of his photographs of long distance Amtrak passengers up in San Francisco City Hall through November 18. I love that every few months a writer, artist, or journalist emerges who has also been working the unique public space of the long distance train.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-secret-lives-of-amtrak-passengers
http://mcnairevans.com/commissions/harpers-magazine-21st-century-limited/

This project culminated (for now) in the Spring of 2015 – here’s a link to my finished beast of a master’s thesis. I hope I get the chance to continue this research and action someday!

Thanks to the fabulous organization and outlet Next City for publishing an article I wrote on long-distance trains and public space. Check it out here.

My thesis advisor Brent Ryan recommended that I think about the train through the lens of its connection to urban environments and the overall concept of urbanity. It’s taken me some time clarify my thinking on these connections but I think I’m beginning to.

• Density. This is a key, yet slippery, concept in urban studies & planning. Much has been written about how to define and its benefits and drawbacks in terms of sustainability, innovation, economics and equity. For my purposes, I’m thinking about the value of a space that brings a diverse group of people together for a diverse set of reasons and, by virtue of their forced proximity, encourages interaction.

• Anonymity. Many people that I met felt comfortable opening up to me about incredibly personal details and I hypothesize that there’s a certain freedom passengers feel because we know we’re unlikely to see each other again. Likewise, as urban centers grow from small towns, anonymity becomes more and more of a defining factor (and was historically connected to fear-mongering around the turn of the 20^th century about the loss of community and hometown values accompanying urban growth).

• Spontaneity. Henri Lefebvre wrote about the ‘right to the city’, and the un-anticipatable and therefore emancipatory qualities of cities due to the complex interplay between the social and material environments. As Margaret Crawford writes about Lefebvre, this creates “political possibilities of a multiplicity of urban imaginaries, representations, and interventions”. The train is similar in this way, which provides a basis for the aspect of my project which will re-imagine new ways of sparking interaction through political, artistic, and tactical interventions.

• Landscapes of Development. The landscape of the railroad is deeply intertwined with American imperialism, westward expansion, and capitalism. Again borrowing from Lefebvre, our conception of the urban / rural divide is overly simplistic. A more accurate conception of the urban landscape includes all land and development that provides for, trades with, and is impacted by urban nodes. This concept is also developed in “Implosions / Explosions”, edited and with an introduction by Neil Brenner.

• Public (?) My thesis group and I are perplexed by the question of whether the train in the U.S. really is a public space—anyone can board (though you have to be able to pay the ticket price); on the other hand, the space is flexible (yet highly regulated), people use if for a variety of reasons (though it was built primarily for industrial purposes), and so on. Similar debates exist regarding privately owned public spaces, urban transit, coffee shops, libraries, and other urban public realm places.
  

I plan to explore these connections and more as the project moves forward.

I’ve ridden about 9,000 miles through 24 states so far, and hope to complete the Crescent (in gray) and a few other lines later this year. The most enjoyable routes are definitely those that are long distance and run east-west - the Sunset Limited (New Orleans to LA), Southwest Chief (Chicago to LA), California Zephyr (Chicago to San Francisco), and the Empire Builder (Chicago to Seattle / Portland). I think the reasons for this are some combination of the length of the trip (2 overnights), the states and regions these trains run through, the design of the trains, and the nature of the staff. This will be tested on the Crescent, which I hope to ride over spring break, which is long distance and goes through interesting towns + landscape but does not have an observation car and ends in the Northeast.

Met this lovely woman on the Empire Builder from North Dakota to Minnesota. She travels monthly with her (service) dog to visit her family and friends back in Minnesota; she moved to North Dakota to work in real estate with the oil boom. She’s figured out all the tricks for making Amtrak work for her, and loves it – stays in the sleepers, brings a small space heater that won’t short the circuit. She mentioned that Amtrak has cut back some of the services that used to make it a little more cozy. The schedule of the train works for her too – she gets on in North Dakota for dinner, and wakes up in time for breakfast before getting off, and the same on the way back. This is much more reasonable of a trip than those commuting to the oil towns from points west, which is a 24-hour or more journey, arriving in North Dakota in the evening.

The aforementioned trip from Portland, OR to Minot, ND was overwhelmingly male. Ranging in age but not much in ethnic background (from what I could tell), the fellows on this train stared coldly at most of the ladies walking down the aisle, making me and another I spoke to more than a little uncomfortable at times. I’d read about the man camps at the oil boom towns, and how rough the culture of these towns can be. The train became a heightened, ephemeral version of this, or so it felt; for the first time I became highly aware  (in a negative way), of how much being on the train can restrict your movement, how intimate it forces you passengers to be with each other. The woman working in the cafe car told me that she sold out of sandwiches early in the day because people just kept eating; I observed a lot of drinking and heard several rough stories of drunkenness, drugs, getting kicked off the train, and one case of violence. As a proselytizing christian kindergarten teacher I spoke to said, “the more times you ride the train, the more craziness you see– I guess it’s like life in that way”.