This slide presentation can vary from 30 to 50 minutes in length, depending on the audience. It encourages the viewer to think "outside the box" about rail transportation's historic and potential relationship to the preservation of landscape and community. The slide portion of the presentation is usually followed by a question and answer session.
Beginning with historic railroad advertising art, Mr. Thorpe shows how the great western railroads and their passenger trains played a major role in establishing the national parks. In doing so they fostered a sense of respect for landscape and community unmatched in recent history. He then considers how this heritage was lost, at great ecological and social cost, with the unbridled spread of the auto. The show challenges the idea that trains are merely nostalgic and concludes with current railroad art as the basis for the thesis that the passenger train is a critical, yet generally unrecognized, means to establish a contemporary respect for environment and community.
Variations of this general theme have been presented to such diverse groups as the Washington State Transportation and Rail Conference, PVA Tours, American Orient Express, Washington Council for the Humanities, Pennsylvania State University's Rail Heritage Conference, guests at Glacier National Park, MT, National Corridors Initiative (Washington DC) Conference, and presentations for Pennsylvania Sate Department of Transportation and Amtrak.
"Your wonderful examples of art and your well-communicated information made the planners feel very good about having you lead off the conference. Your evaluations were predictably superior. One participant wrote, 'No other speaker quite reached the standard set by your 1st presenter, J. Craig Thorpe.' "
Mary Jane Stout, Program Planner
Penn State Alumni Association
