Twenty Years Ago
Since January 2014, Whatcom Watch has been
reprinting article from issues printed 20 years ago.
The below article appeared in the August 2004 issue of Whatcom Watch.
Editor’s Note: This is an abbreviated version of the article. The complete article can be found in the Whatcom Watch archives.
by J. Craig Thorpe
The idea that “railroads” and “preservation” have anything in common, other than maybe in a museum, never occurs to most people. Yet they did and they do have much in common, providing us with some critical answers to current issues.
Take, for instance, sprawl. The consumerism behind it encourages us to pave over more and more urban land. It also encourages us to carry the trappings of commercialism into rural and wilderness areas. The natural consequences of such individualism are a disregard of any landscape and of each other. Not only does the land suffer, so does community.
Years of this SUV (sports utility vehicle) mentality, whether in the likes of Bellevue or the back country, have distanced us from the fact that railroads, and their city cousins the trolley cars, tread lightly on the landscape and enabled community. To be sure, through the 20th century railways epitomized industrialization, and, in places, contributed to its excesses. Yet their rights-of-ways blended with cityscape and landscape alike and their services provided connectivity, mobility and a responsible access to wilderness.
Railroads Once Celebrated Landscapes
In our decades behind the wheel, we have also forgotten that railroads once celebrated the landscapes of their routes. Today there is no “art of the interstate” but there most certainly was an unending body of railway art trumpeting the Delaware Water Gap, Niagara Falls, the Allegheny Mountains, the New England and Florida coasts, the Mississippi River, the Rockies, the deserts of the southwest, the California coast, the rainforests of the Northwest and the glaciers of Alaska.
Nowhere was railway art used more lavishly than in promotion of the national parks. Indeed, the major western railroads were instrumental in the establishment of the nation’s park system. In the 1870s, Northern Pacific money enabled the opening of Yellowstone. By joining forces with preservationists such as John Muir, and working with the Department of the Interior, railroad leaders like Louis Hill of the Great Northern, helped create the National Park Service in 1916. Of course, the rail carriers stood to gain from such support, but, in the words of Walter Fisher, then Secretary of the Interior, it was, “an enlightened self interest.”
Demise of Railway Access Brought Sprawl
Accordingly, millions of travelers entered America’s wonderlands in the company of others and the impact they left was minimal. But, with the demise of railway access, sprawl—and all that goes with it—crashed the gates of Yellowstone and Grand Canyon. While on the urban front of late modernism, our cities and suburbs suffered from the dismantling of the great connectors that were the trolley and interurban lines.
But a certain irony of today’s postmodern techno culture is an openness to community and an embrace of preservation. Two publications of note embody these themes of rail, preservation, community and history. The first is “The Returning City: Historic Preservation and Transit in the Age of Civic Revival” published jointly by the Federal Transit Administration and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
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