GOTHENBURG
NEBRASKA - March 17th, 2020
I discovered Gothenberg, Nebraska on a road trip in 2006. I was looking for a place to photograph the Union Pacific mainline East of North Platte and took a chance on an exit. I got lucky and found the tracks ran right by a series of grain silos and were very accessible, a great spot.
In March on our drive back from the East Coast I made a point to stop in Gothenberg again. The town is small, and it was cold, but still things seemed different, eerily quiet. When I found the Sun Theatre, and its sign which read “No Shows – Stay Healthy”, it was rather intense. I think a photograph of that theatre could end up being one of the most important images of our whole trip. Gothenburg is a community of 3,500 people, a farming community, which it is literally in the center of the United States. It is just under 1,500 miles to New York City if you head East and the same distance if you head West to Los Angeles. It brought in to focus how quickly the pandemic was spreading and the fact there was nowhere to escape it. Nine days before I had been on a normal flight to Boston, the day before I saw Chicago shut down, and now things were shutdown in the Heartland.
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Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska is the world’s largest train yard. It covers 2,850 acres, has 200 separate tracks, 985 switches, and has 139 trains (10,000+ rail cars) pass through it daily.
I’ve liked trains since I was a kid, just something about them. A place like Gothenburg, on a mainline where they probably average 4 to 5 trains an hour, is always good because you know you will see something. We stopped in North Platte after leaving Gothenburg. It was my first time there and I was so surprised that the “Golden Spike Tower” visitors center next to the yard was open. It seemed like every other attraction in the country was closed due to COVID by this point. I think the fact they were still open says something positive about the people there and it ads value to my photographs documenting the COVID era. I also think documenting railroading during the pandemic is also important. When things were shutting down railroads and trucks kept food and supplies moving for the country, something that should not be forgotten. I can not imagine what would have happened to this country if transportation had been shut down, so many lives would have been lost.
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