[On October 7, 1826, America’s first commercial railroad, the Massachusetts Granite Railway, began operations. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that line and other important moments in the history of American commercial rail and its contexts, leading up to this weekend post on pop culture representations!]
Quick thoughts on a quartet of railroad representations:
- The Valley of Ashes (1925): I really enjoyed that hyperlinked Literary Kicks piece trying to pin down the location of the train station in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, not only for the thoroughness of author Levi Asher’s exploration of the archives, but also and especially because it reminds us that this location isn’t just symbolic (although it is of course also that, as literally countless high school essays highlight). Trains affect their landscapes, and indeed between the 1826 moment that originated this series and the 1925 publication of Fitzgerald’s novel, it’s fair to say that no form of transportation had even close to the impact on American settings than the railroad. Many of those were passenger trains, but at least as many were commercial ones like those on which I’ve focused in this series.
- The Greatest Show on Earth (1952): That train wreck sequence in Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film was one of the most elaborate and expensive set pieces in 20th century American cinema, and is certainly more interesting than the rest of the film (with the exception of Jimmy Stewart as an accused murderer who disguises himself as a circus clown!). But it also compellingly parallels the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show crash about which I wrote in Thursday’s post, providing a stunning visual depiction of that horrific historical event.
- “Casey Jones” (1970): This Grateful Dead track doesn’t have much to do with the real-life Mississippi railroad engineer at the center of a famous 1900 commercial train crash, nor with the folk song “The Ballad of Casey Jones” that had been kicking around since not long after that early 20th century moment. I could of course have featured the folk song in this space instead, but I think the Dead’s song reflects not only how such historic train stories have echoed down through the decades in our pop culture, but also how they can become powerful symbols of themes beyond themselves: “Trouble with you is/The trouble with me/Got two good eyes/But we still don’t see.” 2026 would have to agree.
- Unstoppable (2010): I haven’t seen this film, which costars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine and was the last made by legendary action director Tony Scott before his untimely passing in 2012; from the summary and reviews it sounds like a pretty conventional disaster film (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), and one where the titular train is more a vehicle (sorry) for the action than a focal subject in its own right. But I would add this: what makes this particular train so dangerously unstoppable is that it’s unmanned, relying on computerized systems that, quelle surprise, can malfunction (and did in the real 2001 events on which the film is based). A detail that reflects both how much had changed since the Granite Railway in 1826 and, given the accidents in both cases, how much had stayed the same.
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Rail representations or histories you’d share?
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