Railroad Noir: The American West and the End of the Twentieth Century (review)

Linda Grant Niemann, who worked for the Southern Pacific and later the Union Pacific from 1979 to 1991, has compiled her experiences into a provocative series of narratives that reveal the blue-collar condition. Buttressing her words are the images of renowned photographer Joel Jensen. This is a work of scholarship, but not the type with footnotes. Imagine instead an anthropological exploration of the industrial workforce in the age of Reagan, complete with rituals of sex, performances of gender, sacred foods and libations, initiation and funereal customs, and systems of order to define tribal membership and the status of the “other.” Scholars who seek to understand the realities of skilled industrial labor and the lived experience of workers in the world of deregulation, Title IX, union-busting, and head-spinning corporate mergers will be nothing but pleased with this book. It should simultaneously disabuse almost anyone from seeking out this line of work while leaving them yearning for its odd poetic beauty.

By sheer accident, Niemann worked on train crews throughout the American Southwest and on the West Coast right through the most wrenching labor and corporate transformations of the twentieth century. She was one of the first female train crew hires on the railroad, rode through the massive layoffs that attended the elimination of state laws and union agreements that protected full crews, and had a career (one of several) in the industry, until age and illness made continuation unworkable.

Niemann is at her strongest when she discusses gender in the industrial workplace, capturing the simultaneously brutal and delicate negotiations that attended the movement of women into historically male and intensely masculine workspaces in the 1970s and 1980s. She describes in unsparing detail the vicious insults and equally painful silent dismissals of many male colleagues, balanced by the genuine efforts of other old hands to teach a rookie the ropes, regardless of gender, if only to get the job done safely and quickly. Her sexuality sits at the center of the narrative, a humming refrain that provides both refuge and isolation.

Three themes run as red threads through Niemann’s narrative. The first revolves around violence, the damage done to the body, the soul, and the mind by hard work, brutal conditions, addictive self-medication, and the constant fear of unemployment or debilitating injury. The second emerges from her determination to make no excuses for her work, to learn her task, and to act the professional, seasoned and reliable for her colleagues, all in an environment that was not friendly to women or neophytes. The last, and most poignant, is the juxtaposition of the steel world of the rails and the rich rural spiritual life Niemann finds in Mexico.

Joel Jensen’s photographs are stark, beautiful, intimate portraits of the work of railroading out on the line. Standing on their own they are a visual joy and reflect acutely the sense but not the places of Niemann’s stories. While the stories emerge from the Southern Pacific Railroad, many of the images depict railroads and railroaders from the Upper Great Plains. A curious aspect of the images, for all the vibrant character studies of Neimann’s prose, is that the inside dust cover features twice as many facial portraits as the text. Despite this, Jensen evokes successfully the loneliness and isolation of the railroading occupation, set against the ugly—and the stunning—vistas of the continent. He inhabits a space, as a photographer of the railroad landscape, somewhere between the delicate black-and-white landscapes of David Plowden and the rich, casual, color images of Gary J. Ben-son, more interested in the grittiness than Plowden and less focused on the paraphernalia than Benson, while retaining the best qualities of both.

Most scholarship, even in the humanities, assumes an air of distance from its subject, fearful that sentiment or attachment might cloud the analytical mind; this is proper and correct...