Mark Ruwedel, Central Pacific #18 , from the series Westward the Course of Empire . Gelatin silver print, 8 ¬ × ¬ 10 in., 1994. Courtesy of Mark Ruwedel.
Here is how you tear up railroad track. “ The jaw of a giant loader plucked up railroad ties in its teeth. A wheelbarrow-like contraption sucked up bolts and spikes, and spit them out. Guys in hardhats snipped off power cables and yanked down wire fences. ” 1 Stripped for metal during World War II, railroads are now stripped for tax reasons. Gradually, thousands of miles of track have been abandoned since peaking at 254,000 miles in 1916; 2 the pace has only sped up since deregulation in 1980. In photographer Mark Ruwedel ’ s Central Pacific #18 (1994), you can see the track bed exposed and eroding ( figure 1.1 ). A pile of bent trestles along the side disrupts the symmetry of the composition. The familiar parallel lines of a railroad track heading to the vanishing point seem to signal another vanishing: the railroad, that technology of the machine age, itself heading for obsolescence.
But the relatively recent gouges and tire marks in Ruwedel ’ s photograph suggest that the railroad has not been swept aside entirely by new technologies. In fact, the relationship between old and new is a complicated one,because beneath the abandoned railroad bed from the nineteenth century lies fiber-optic cable, technology of the twenty-first century. In 1978, the track ’ s owner, the Southern Pacific Railroad, realized that it could sell excess capacity on its network — heretofore used for internal communications, such as train signaling — to corporate customers. A few years later, the Southern Pacific spun off this telecommunications division, the Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network; its new acronym was SPRINT. Around ten years later, it spun off a second company, Southern Pacific Telecommunications Company, later renamed Qwest, to run fiber beneath its rights-of-way. Together,