All things must pass, however. With more and more writing and photography in the works, having a URL of my name became more and more obviously the smart choice, and hanging onto route99west.com became a less and less defensible bit of sentimentality.

So with this post, I am announcing that route99west.com is being wound down, and all its content will now, and likely for a long time to come, be located at alexcraghead.com. This includes The Addendum, now to be found under a new URL, but the same folder: alexcraghead.com/addendum/. The design has been heavily redone as well, with far larger pictures, a slightly slicker gallery function, a bit of juggled organization, and a new section on in-process projects. I anticipate that alexcraghead.com will be a bit more dynamic than route99west.com was.

In the next few weeks, I will remove the old content from route99west.com. The domain I will keep, however — I can’t bear to part with it, though I don’t know what I will use it for. In the meanwhile, update your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions, and welcome to the new site.

As a writer, This year has been a rather busy one for me, and now there’s yet another assignment to add to the mix. Effective with the August issue, I am now a columnist for Railfan & Railroad magazine. Titled “Departures,” my monthly column replaces that of the late editor emiritus, Jim Boyd, at the front of every issue.

So just what is Railfan & Railroad, or for that matter what the heck is a railfan? 

To be a railfan is to be someone who has a passion for railroads. While some railfans also work in the rail transportation industry, the vast majority of them simply like railroads. This nterest finds its expression in many ways, ranging from riding trains to collecting rail-related items to making photographs of railroads. These passions can range from casual interest to true obsession. There are people, for example, who are compelled to ride every foot of track they can, even if it means waiting for rare passenger train detour movements or chartering a train. There are people who collect books and ephemera to the extent that their houses begin to resemble the closing scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, as the ark disappears into a seemingly endless government warehouse of boxes stacked to the rafters. There are people who will, with less than a week’s notice, book a flight to go see and photograph the last run of a once common locomotive on an about-to-be-closed industrial track. Railfan & Railroad is a magazine that specifically caters to the railfan community, in all its geeky glory.

Indeed, “Departures” is a column specifically aimed at highlighting these sort of high-geek raifan acitivites. The column is an exploration of the wide variety of activities that make up this diverse hobby, from the sober and academic to the amusing and absurd, and always just a tad obsessive. I encourage you to pick up a copy, and let me know what you think.

Fresh from the post and the printers: the “Portland Switching District Project: An Overview” in the National Railroad Historical Society Bulletin

It’s been a busy spring, and there’s a few more publications to add to the list. First up: “The Portland Switching District Project: An Overview,” in the Spring issue of the National Railroad Historical Society Bulletin. This is a short text and twelve photos from the series. Unlike the recent show, this article contains images from throughout the switching districts of the Portland area. Many thanks to Bulletin editor Jeff Smith for helping this one fly. Although you cannot find the publication on a newsstand, you can purchase them as back issues directly from the NRHS here for $4, which is a great deal.

I shouldn’t pass on from this topic without also noting that the remainder of this issue is taken up by two great articles by photographer and thinker Jeff Brouws. The first of these is an article on the railroad as landscape, and is illustrated with numerous of his own photographs, along with those of other talented photographers such as Keith Burgess, Wayne Depperman, John Fasulo, Phil Hastings, my friend Scott Lothes, Greg McDonnell, Kevin Scanlon, and the late Richard Steinheimer.

This last name brings up some sad news. If you are a follower of railroad photography, you likely already know that Richard Steinheimer, known affectionately as “Stein”, died on May 4th. The Center for Railroad Photography and Art has been running a tribute to the man on its web site. In addition, in cooperation with Trains Magazine, the Center is running a two part collection of remembrances of the man by other railroad photographers. My own contribution will be up in part two, but for now, I encourage you to read part one, and gather a glimpse of how much the man meant as a photographer, and to those who were fortunate to known him personally, as a human being.

Also while I’m on the subject, I have never taken the time to sum up the Center’s 2011 “Conversations About Photography” conference. The event took place in the middle of last month, and I was privileged to be a part of making it happen. The conference is without question the most interesting rail photography event in North America, and well worth attendance. This year, one of my main tasks was to “live-cast” the event on the Center’s Facebook page. If you’ve been thinking of going, visit there and scroll back to mid April for a bit of flavor of what it’s about. And before I move off this subject, thanks to everyone at the Center — and especially to John Gruber — for including me as part of the team!

For the May, 2011 issue of Trains, I wrote a news story on the continuing efforts of Portland’s Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation to construct a permanent museum complex near the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Also in May, I wrote the lead editorial for Railfan & Railroad Magazine’s issue on Amtrak 40th anniversary. My piece, titled “Amtrak against all odds” examines the nation’s rail passenger carrier today, and makes the case that contrary to conventional wisdom, it has been a brilliant success, as it has held the line against politics and kept the American passenger train from disappearing forever.

For June publications — which in the strange world of publishing has been on the newsstands for two weeks now — the theme is Tacoma, Tacoma, Tacoma. Trains ran a piece on Tacoma’s Union Station, what may be the greatest railway architecture Cinderella story in the Pacific Northwest. This story for Trains focused on the Herculean efforts of those who restored the station, and includes interview material with Jim Merritt, an architect who, in the process of working on the station restoration, undertook some of the craziest stunts I’ve heard of in the name of historic preservation. For Railfan, I produced a smaller story on the importance of the station to the Tacoma community; this one can be viewed online, and includes interior images of the facility, which is now a federal courthouse.

I’ve also been writing a lot of op-eds for the front-of-book in Railfan, filling in after the death of Editor Emeritus Jim Boyd, who previously penned the space. Following the Amtrak column were two more, the first on the mixture of craziness and historic importance that railfanning sometimes plays, and the second on the value of spending time photographing railroads that are more rural and obscure.

Lastly, I have a small feature coming up in Railfan on the Tacoma Link streetcar. The article will be part of the magazine’s Tacoma-focused July issue, in honor of the NRHS national convention in Tacoma from June 20-26.

It’s been a busy spring!

Although most of the pieces I have been doing lately have been news-oriented, one stands out that I thought I would share here. Railfan & Railroad has run a short piece I wrote on TriMet’s “new” commuter rail cars, vintage 1950s equipment. Also included are two images of the trains on their first day of revenue service.

Now I must dash — I have to go add to that publications list some more.

After months of work, a project I am quite proud of is about to become available. Nearly a year ago, I was approached by fellow photographer Joel Jensen. Joel has been photographing scenes of the American West for decades, especially images of vernacular landscape such as churches, motels, and railway depots. For this last body of work, Joel issued me a challenge: to write ~10,000 words on the American railway depot to accompany about forty of his images, the whole to occupy an entire issue of the National Railway Historical Society‘s Bulletin,.

Needless to say this was a big task! Joel gave me a pretty free hand to set the details of the piece, so after kicking a few quick ideas around I set to work on one of the biggest single writing projects I’ve undertaken in a while.

To a lover of culture, the American railway depot is particularly fascinating. It is an artifact of the country’s Industrial Age, and as such its changing roles provide a useful yardstick by which to measure vast American cultural shifts. Once the center of the community as well as the prototype of aloof corporate hegemony, the depot has traded its power for a potent and largely misleading symbolism.

They’re here! They’re here!

Joel’s photographs are a stunning review of this glacial-scale decline in power. From the soaring towers of the grand urban terminals to the defeatism of the so-called “Amshack” platform shelter, Joel captures less the typical nostalgia of loss than the somewhat sharper pangs of regret, neglect, and wanton destruction. There is a certain and potent irony in seeing structures built to last for ages tossed aside like a deer carcass beside the road, not yet a century old. Equally moving are the small rural depots, reduced to poor paint, infrequent service, ignominy, and despair.

To try and capture a sense of that in the words I penned for the piece was a tall order, but I hope I might have at least scratched at the surface of some of the truths buried within Joel’s photos. If you can find a copy — the Bulletin is available online here — please pick it up and let me know what you think.

Last but not least, thanks to Joel Jensen for an excellent collaboration, to Buleltin editor Jeff Smith, and to everyone who made this project possible.

Earlier in the year I noted some photos and text published on the Railfan & Railroad web-extra section, “Extra Board.” At the time, these small stories were not archived. That has now changed, and “Last Light at 12th Street” can now be viewed here.

What makes up the cultural DNA of Portland? This is a question that, as a student of cities, I constantly ask myself. It is the reason I have travelled to other cities in the region, spanning from Vancouver, B.C. to San Francisco. It is the reason I have a passion for history, a passion for photography, a passion for local food. All of these things help me to form perspective on what makes this place, this urban region, so unique.

A number of weeks ago, friend and fellow Portland blogger Dan Haneckow lead a history tour around his neighborhood, the Overlook area of Portland. Taking place on a fine, sunny, but breezy afternoon, the walk attracted around fifty people of all ages and backgrounds. Dan lead us through the streets north of the old town of Albina, as far east as Interstate 5, and as far north as Killingsworth. Along the way we learned about the filling of ravines, secret basement speakeasy bars, Polish enclaves, victims of the Japanese internment, and all sorts of other historic scraps.

At about 7 p.m., the tour wound down, and about eight of us stuck around (Dan and myself included) to have dinner and a beer at the Lucky Lab and talk history. A gaze around the table was fascinating. Old mixed with young, newcomers mixed with natives, blue collar mixed with white. And what was this diverse crowd doing over beers, in the blue-hour light, on a random Summer sunday evening?

We were discussing where, of all things, the Piggly Wiggly used to be.

Of all the things, this strange mix of backgrounds, ages, occupations, and origins all had one thing in common, and that was an intense interest — perhaps love — of place. By place I don’t mean the grandness of the bridge-hemmed river, the cast iron Gilded Age remnants of Old Town, or the postcard-stock rose gardens and parks. I mean instead the most intimate levels of location. Building by building, block by block, the finest grain of urbanity. These were people who cared who owned the house before them as well as who came before them, and before them, and so on back to the builders. These were people who wanted to know just what used to be in the coffee shop, just why the building on the corner is rounded, just why there’s a tall, odd, green metal pole that stands orphan beside the road.

This love of place is a kind of historic hyper-localism, or as Lost Oregon’s John Chilson recently described it to me, “micro-history.” I hesitate to say whether this trait is unique to Portland, but there is no question to me that this sensitivity to the most intimate levels of historical narrative is a definite part of the Portland DNA, a common element of culture that crosses generational, economic, and social lines.

Naturally, in filling in the answers about the Portland DNA, I unearth yet more questions. Is this hyper-local historicism something that only reveals itself to a person after living in a place for a certain amount of time? Is it accessible only to the native or the local, of importance and available not to the visitor? And, therefore, is it rampant everywhere, but simply unavailable to me without living in those other places? Or, conversely, is it a unique quality or character of being of or from this region that we call Portland? Do we, here, breed and mold a culture of historicism? There has, after all, always been a reflective, contemplative, and inward turning tendency here. Maybe, just maybe, we’re all just a little geeky for what came before. Not a surprise, perhaps, for the city that reintroduced the world to the streetcar.

This month I have two articles in the Online Extras section at the website of TRAINS Magazine. Both of these stories were written for a content extra that promotes the activities of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art, whose excellent 2010 conference I attended (and impromptu got drafted into staff for) in April.

The first of these articles focused on taking a project-based approach to railroad photography. As with many genre-driven photographic subcultures, the railroad photography crowd has a tendency to try and “shoot everything” and to try and capture subjects before change wipes them from memory. One possible approach to dealing with this successfully is to try and make better predictions about what is likely to be gone in the near future.

My approach, however, is different. I believe capturing the present before it is lost is less important than being cohesive in what you, as a photographer, are trying to say. The piece which ran earlier in August advocated this approach and explained how and why it can lead to better photographic results.

Today, the second half of the two-part series was put up on the web. In this article, I share one of my recent projects and use it to explain how I apply the project-based approach to railroad photography.

This is the first public unveiling of a series I have been spending a considerable amount of my time shooting. By-and-large, this is my attempt to create a railroad photography project that doesn’t rest on the romanticism and Grand-Style traditions that dominate this genre. It also represents a much more distinctive personal stylistic voice applied to the subject. I have to say, using this series as a basis of a teaching moment was a bit… hairy. Showing a major project to the public for the first time can be a nerve-wracking thing.

One last note: my thanks go out to photographers Wes Carr, the Center’s Scott Lothes, and Kyle Weismann-Yee, for contributing images to both articles. You made me look good.

Back from the Center for Railroad Photography and Art‘s 2010 “Conversations About Photography” conference in Chicagoland, I’ve got a few brief things to catch up on.

First, Railfan and Railroad has published two of my photos and a short article about the relationship between the railroad and the Guild’s Lake industrial park in Portland (which I also briefly wrote about here a while ago). The story and photos were run on the Extra Board, a new web exclusive monthly feature on Railfan’s new web site. The only downside is that (right now at least) there is no archive for articles on the Extra Board, so once the July story goes up in about 30 days, the story and photos will disappear from the web.

I’m particularly happy with the photos they ran, especially the lead. (I’d link to it on my Flickr but really, go see it at Railfan’s site while it’s up.) Thanks to the boys at R&R for running this.

Second, the other photograph published with this story is a close-up of a Keline switch lock, one of many that can still be found in Guild’s Lake. This is also a photograph from a new series I am currently shooting, a long-term project to try and break through some of the conventions of the railroad photography genre. Expect more about this process over the coming year.

For more photos of Guild’s Lake’s, check out the Flickr Job 101 set or see everything of mine from Guild’s.

UPDATE (9/20/2010): Railfan is now archiving the “Extra Board,”, and “Last Light at 12th Street” can now be viewed here.

Denman Street and the West End is a prime example of a place where the focus is not on tourism as much as on the local, as evidenced by the presence of — tada! — that novelty, the grocery store, along with a post office and lots of small inexpensive restaurants. This is everyday Vancouver. And — perhaps this will come as no surprise — I enjoyed it far more than touristy Gastown or the shops of Granville Street. Keep Stanley Park, keep the Harbour Centre viewpoint, keep the Olympic Village. It is here at the West End (as well as places like the Chinese streets of Richmond) where the authentic Vancouver can be felt.

At Kintaro, in Vancouver, B.C.’s West End, ramen is served up from a genuine Japanese-style ramen shop.

Sitting in Kintaro — a ramen shop on Denman — I found heaven. The little shop’s kitchen is hopping with two young Japanese men, holding up the tradition of this culinary genre. Both staff and clientele are young, which bodes well for the future of the shop. Indeed, the formula must be paying off, as there are two more ramen shops within a block’s distance, and a third a bit beyond that.

Ramen, gyoza, Heaven.

The noodles came tasty, swimming in a rich miso-based broth, and accompanied by the prerequisite slice of pork, hard boiled egg, and a mix of vegetables. I also ordered a plate of gyoza, succulent and hot. This is the real comfort food, the way I like it, putting a smile on my face and made with genuine love for the art of its creation.

In Portland, Kintaro would be an ethnic restaurant, a culinary lark in a solidly intellectual, liberal, Caucasian American city. But here, in a metropolitan region where less than half the population speaks English as a first tongue, Kintaro is more akin to home cooking. And that is why, to me, this bowl of ramen is the real Vancouver.