John Gruber
Conductor Tom Burke
It’s strange to contemplate planes and trains together, at least without John Candy. But a fascinating new photography exhibit at the Dane County Regional Airport brings it all together.
The Faces of Railroading: Railroading and the Making of Madison and Dane County collects more than 40 images from The Center for Railroad Photography & Art. Founded in 1997 and based here in Madison, its exhibits travel the country.
Behemoth diesels of the 2000s are made beautiful by photo pros capturing unsuspected candy colors, while halftone steam monsters cross streets we recognize yet today. But it’s portraiture that makes the show: Theodore Roosevelt standing stiffly on tracks, Harry Truman speaking from a railcar. And Ralph “Dugan” Keppler in his Milwaukee Road office, making sense of a litter of papers, ancient candlestick phone at his side … in 1980!
Then there’s the earnest young employee of the Wisconsin & Southern in 2006, an emigrant who observes, in the caption, that “Railroads are a much bigger part of the economy in Latvia. I don’t know why people here use more trucks than railroads.” Inside an airport with its own parking ramp, that’s nearly poignant.
Angus McVicar, the photographer who documented so much of mid-20th century Madison, again proves a star. So, too, the late John Gruber, founder of the center. And Henry Koshollek displays prescience by capturing Madison railroading as it crumbled.
Still others document funerals: Madison’s last Chicago & North Western passenger train: 1963; the Milwaukee Road’s last: 1971.
John Gruber
From left, Charles Shorty, Robert Gordon in a diesel locomotive, and conductor Robert Heiligenthal.
If the exhibit were placed in a museum, more depth and better context would be welcome. It’s perhaps not useful to know that the former site of the Chicago & North Western depot later became the Badger Bus Depot. Better to know that today it’s the CVS pharmacy on West Washington Avenue. Similarly, the Kohl Center displaced the Milwaukee Road roundhouse and yard.
Without rail, says historian and author Jack Holzhueter, “Madison would never have grown as it did, nor would it have the appearance it has today.” But the exhibit does little to explore that idea.
This airport show is for people who, for the most part, are waiting to go somewhere else. All by itself, the gallery is well worth a visit.
But it’s impossible to please all critics. A child’s loose scrawl in the exhibit’s comment box reads, “HI I like rideing the airplane.”
The show is staged by Tandem Press. Faces of Railroading will be exhibited at the Dane County Regional Airport through Jan. 26.
