Why Nearly Every Famous American Was Photographed on a Train Platform

🚂 Of the 466 photographs in this film, 236 were taken at Union Station in Washington. For about forty years that was where American public life physically arrived. The reason is the camera. A press photographer in 1920 has a heavy camera that needs a tripod and light and cannot be aimed at something unexpected. What it needs is a place where important people are guaranteed to be, at a time known in advance, standing still. A railway platform is exactly that. The train has a timetable, the person has to get off it, and there is a gap of perhaps ninety seconds during which somebody famous is on foot, outdoors, in reasonable light, and cannot leave. 🕐 The film also covers the railway's largest effect on ordinary life, which almost nobody notices: until 1883 noon was whenever the sun was overhead where you stood. On 18 November that year the railway companies divided the continent into standard zones and switched over, because timetables need everyone to agree what time it is and the alternative is collisions. Clocks were stopped and restarted and the day had two middays. No government did this; Congress did not put it into law until 1918. ⚰️ And it covers what the station was for. Thirty-four of these captions mention a president. Ten are funerals, which is the heaviest category in the file, because a railway station is where a body comes home. It ends with the morning in January 1953 when a locomotive came through the concourse floor, five days before an inauguration. 📷 Every picture in this film is a real archive photograph. Nothing is recreated. 🗂️ All images are public domain, from the Library of Congress, the US National Archives and Wikimedia Commons. #railway #history #washingtondc #unionstation #archivephotography