Ian Logan fell in love with American railroads back in the 1950s.
Inspired by the songs of folk and Motown, he set off to see the places,
the trains, the locomotives, and the everyday life of the first
machine-powered transportation system on the North American continent. A
designer of fabrics, tin, and enamelware, Ian Logan was fascinated by
the typography and graphics of the railroad companies. In the 1960s and
1970s he made scores of journeys recording the insignia, the logos, the
slogans, and livery of railroad companies big and small, East and West
coast and transcontinental. He even created designs for them. In
Logomotive, Ian Logan's photographs are assembled into chapters and
picture essays recalling the great days of lines such as the Santa Fe,
the Union Pacific, and the Kansas City Southern. One of his journeys is
presented as a travelogue in which he meets the Fat Controller, gets to
sound the horn, and wanders into freight yards to see the last
generation of streamline locomotives rusting amid the weeds. Animal
motifs, Native American allusions, advertising slogans, names of famous
trains such as the Super Chief and the Wabash Cannonball provide the
subject matter for other picture features. When Ian Logan embarked on
his journeys the passenger railway system was already declining under
competition from the auto mobile and the plane. He was just in time to
capture a vanishing world. Construction workers were demolishing the
Southern Pacific railroad depot in San Francisco while he photographed
it. Here is a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse into the past, preserved on
film by the enthusiasm of a designer who knows a good graphic when he
sees one. In the accompanying text, the eminent design commentator
Jonathan Glancey explores the distinctive visual language of the US
railroads, reveling in its gritty dynamism.