Illinois Railway Museum
For me, the Illinois Railway Museum is the kind of place where it is almost impossible to stop looking. Rows of locomotives, passenger cars, streetcars, signs, machinery, and other pieces of transportation history fill the grounds, but it was the smaller details that continually drew my attention. Old railroad logos, hand-painted numbers, faded lettering, rivets, peeling paint, polished metal, weathered wood, and decades-old company insignia carry their own histories. In my world of interest, these details are often as compelling as the enormous machines they adorn.
That became the focus of this photographic series. Most of the images are close-up studies of those graphic and textural details, captured in the camera’s native 2:3 aspect ratio. I also included roughly twenty wider views of locomotives, historic CTA cars, and other equipment, many edited in a square format to emphasize their fronts, symmetry, and physical presence while minimizing background distractions.
Although black and white is usually my instinct, color felt essential here. The reds, yellows, greens, blues, polished steel, faded paint, and weathered surfaces are part of the history of these machines and of the companies that operated them. One especially personal image shows a pair of CTA 2000-series cars, familiar to me from my youth in Skokie, IL.
With 100+ individually edited photographs, this became my largest series to date. Taken together, the images move between the monumental and the intimate, finding beauty not only in the locomotives themselves, but in the typography, color, wear, and accumulated history found across their surfaces.
