Ballwin professor’s photos capture much more than trains
Ballwin resident Carlos Schwantes has had a passion for trains from the moment a powerful Pennsylvania Railroad steam engine roared past his childhood home in Greenfield, Ind. A young boy infatuated with the power, speed and romance of the rails, Schwantes dreamed of the day he would board the esteemed Spirit of St. Louis sleeper car en route to the bright lights of New York City. In the early 1970s, then a young man in his 20s, Schwantes grabbed a seat for his first ride aboard the idolized machine of his youth. Despite its deterioration and obvious abandonment, something about that passenger car called to Schwantes, and he has been riding the rails ever since.
For the past 40 years, the rails have provided Schwantes more than a means of transport; they have been a source of livelihood and the studio for his art. Schwantes began teaching transportation studies as an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1968. Today, he is the St. Louis Mercantile Library Endowed Professor of Transportation Studies at the University of Missouri St. Louis (UMSL), which houses the largest library of transportation texts in the nation. The classroom and the rails – oftentimes one and the same – became the subjects of his photography. His travels and photographs have culminated in numerous lectures, academic papers, books and most recently, a memoir.
“Just One Restless Rider: Reflections on Trains and Travel” (University of Missouri Press, 2009) is a deeply personal account of Schwantes’ life’s work. Page after page of rich and textured photographs capture much more than engines and steel, and the captions beneath them read more like diary entries.
“Just One Restless Rider” is Schwantes’ 20th published book and is the most reflective of his life’s journey.
“At the age of 64, I decided to pause and use this book to reflect on certain aspects of life,” Schwantes said. “If nothing else, I want readers to see familiar things in a new way.”
Sprinkled throughout 190 pages, photographs of smokestacks, coal engines and skyscrapers elicit such reflection.
“In the age of heightened environmental consciousness, many people will see smokestacks as relics of the environmental dark ages,” Schwantes said. “For me, the smokestacks I observed along the tracks in the 1950s and 1960s were symbols of America’s industrial might, not its contribution to a global carbon footprint.”
Convinced that travel tells the story of everyday life, Schwantes used the rails as the setting to capture humanity in real time. Schwantes’ photographs of long abandoned warehouses along the rails of America’s heartland, railroad employees and modern-day European train stations equipped with state-of-the-art light rail capture life in motion and consequently reflect its only constant, which is change.
“Life is a series of stories; beginnings and endings, comings and goings,” Schwantes said. “I have always been interested in the human side of trains, and I wanted to write a book that was accessible to everyone, not just train enthusiasts.”
Schwantes seems to have accomplished that goal with his latest book.
For a full list of Schwantes’ gooks, visit amazon.com or the UMSL library.
