Not Quite Trainspotting
I’m not really what the British and Australians would call a trainspotter (or what Americans would call a railfan) — I don’t obsessively fill notebooks with locomotive serial numbers, nor do I really know much about the various types of locomotives or trains or whatever (although I did a little bit of engineering work with train signaling a long time ago) — I’m just fascinated by the way that the trains you see snaking their way across the Mojave seem more natural inhabitants of the desert than the cars and trucks buzzing along the freeways and blacktops (not to mention the pumped pickups and ATVs on the desert trails). The trains are more stately, they (obviously) never push their way off-track, there’s none of the angry noise and movement of cars and pickups and bikes and RVs, etc. And the colors and the shapes seem to me to blend in a little more smoothly with the natural background (although I’m probably delusional on that one). And if you’ve ever driven the old Route 66 through the Mojave, the trains are an omnipresent part of that experience, huge trains carrying freight Back East seemingly every few minutes along the main lines coming up out of Los Angeles.
Watching (and hearing!) a long double-decker container train blasting its way up the grade at Bagdad or Ludlow crossing, or going through the Mojave River bridge at Afton Canyon (you can stand under the bridge and have the train go right over you a few feet above you — it’s an experience), can be almost hypnotic at times, something I’ve wanted to capture on video for years. The video part is usually fairly easy, but the sound part is much harder, particularly for someone like me who usually has to work on his own — a diesel locomotive makes an astonishing sound up close in real life (full of clicks and whirs and screeches and whoops as well as the more obvious full-throated lower-spectrum engine noises), and getting that down digitally in full quality and in sync with the video side has proved elusive. And the rest of the train has its own varied screeching thudding metallic soundtrack as well… I’m still working on it. And I’m slowly working on doing a full-length Desert Trains video; until then, it’s mostly fragments caught on the fly, usually as by-products of other projects…