Basin Road
Trains often strike me as the natural non-natural inhabitants of the desert, if you get what I mean. They so often seem to suit the surroundings in ways that cars, trucks, and RVs don’t, and watching one thundering its way slowly up the grade through Bagdad or Siberia in the Mojave desert, or snaking through Afton Canyon between Barstow and Las Vegas, you get a feeling of a certain grace and appropriateness that you don’t get with smaller things like cars and trucks. Coming across a busy two-track line in the middle of the harsh desert in the middle of nowhere — miles from any real road — with signals controlled from literally hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away, is always a strange experience. Especially when you never see another living person around, despite the steady rumbling flow of huge double-decker container trains heading Back East or just back to LA (or Oakland) every few minutes along those lines. And stumbling into scenes like the one above, on Basin Road (a dirt track not too far from the tiny town of Baker, California), can lead to a sudden sense of dislocation or confusion for a few seconds. And the noise… you can usually hear the trains from miles away; as they get closer, that deep diesel roar gets joined by the high-pitched metallic squealing of wheels, axles, and brakes, and the empty-sounding thumps of … whatever … as the train passes in front of you for minutes on end.
And when you consider what it must have been like to put these tracks down, and get trains through here on a regular basis, back in the days before electricity, trucks and cars (the automotive versions), and convenient communications — well, that always seems quite a feat too. They were here long before the freeways and cars.
I’ve been taking photos of trains in the desert for a couple for decades now, even though I’m not any sort of trainspotter (“railfan”, in American English), and couldn’t tell you the difference between an EMD SD90MAC diesel locomotive and an old NSWGR Class 46 electric set (well, maybe I could, but that’s only because I once worked very briefly in railway signals a long time ago, and it’s not something I’d admit to in polite company). But my train photos are almost never about the trains themselves — they’re about that odd combination of low-slung metallic rectangularity and straight-line geometries, and the more natural jaggedness and organic broken curves of the surrounding desert and mountains. And the colors… in the Mojave, the trains — locomotives and cars — tend to have more garish versions of the same colors as the surrounding desert and skies (even, in some ways, the pure metal silvers), and blend in in ways cars and trucks just don’t. To my eyes, anyway….
