Railroads: What’s Your Sign?

Cafe Witteveen (run by friend Jeremy W.) featured a website dedicated to the insignias of railroads long gone by. Honoring my Maryland roots, here’s a Baltimore & Ohio insignia from 1945:

This reminded me of a job Walker Evans did in 1956 for a Fortune Magazine article entitled “Before They Disappear.”  The film is housed in the Walker Evans Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of art, 1994.259.11.1-155. Interestingly, the Fortune article did not mean “before trains disappear,” but was focusing on older railroad insignias being replaced by mid-century commercial designers, “lurking near, T square poised.”

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994.259.11.1.

 

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About Becky Fifield

Starting her museum career at age 13, Becky Fifield is a museum collections manager at a New York City organization. She is the Chair for Alliance for Response NYC and Vice Chair for the American Institute for Conservation's Collections Care Network. There's a bit of pun in the title The Still Room, delineating a quiet space brimming with the ingredients of memory, where consideration, analysis, and wordcraft can take place. Ms. Fifield’s interests include museum practice, dress history, historic preservation, transit, social and women’s history, food, current events, geneaology, roadtrips, and considerations on general sense of place. Becky and her husband, Dr. V, live in New York City.