Read Brian Byrn's Foreword
Read John Bower's Introduction
Read John Bower's Afterword
Look at sample images
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The motto, "Crossroads of America," implies that there’s a lot in Indiana having to do with transportation. And there is—as Hoosier photographer John Bower discovered while crisscrossing the state in search of an extensive, culturally influential, transportation heritage. The result, Journey's End: Relics and ruins of Indiana's transportation legacy, showcases forlorn and rusting steam locomotives, diesel engines, automobiles, trucks, interurbans, and towboats—as well as crumbling infrastructure, factories, and garages. These are all rapidly disappearing objects and places from our collective past that have helped defined us as a state, and as a people.
Journey's End is a book filled with emotional portraits of once gleaming, but now rusted, vehicles abandoned along fence rows, lonely depots adjacent to trackless railroad grades, and defunct service stations whose retired pumps offer gas at 31¢ a gallon. These are images that will spark transportation memories in everyone who sees them—of those Sunday drives to Grandma's, interminable waits at railroad crossings hoping for the arrival of a caboose, a first airplane flight, a first car, or the long bus rides to school. These stunning images are iconic reminders of where we have come from—and the means of transport we took along the way.
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