JE About

Journey's End: Relics and ruins of Indiana's transportation legacy

PHOTOGRAPHY by John Bower, FOREWORD by Brian Byrn

JECover

Read Brian Byrn's Foreword.
Read John Bower's Introduction.
Read John Bower's Afterword
Look at sample images.

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.

The project description and philosophy

Transportation is absolutely basic to our definition of who we are. So much so, that each of us can recall transportation stories that were such a part of growing up that we can't imagine our life without "planes, trains, and automobiles." And, collectively, as human beings, we've evolved with transportation being a vital part of how we've developed as a species. Personally, I have so many transportation memories (and I know others have similar recollections) that they are a part of the definition of me. So, for this book, I've felt compelled to track down all manner of transportation relics and ruins that have been a part of Indiana's past. I certainly don't know the specific stories associated with most of the photographs in Journey's End, but I know that the stories exist, and that the images will trigger all sorts of memories.

For this project, I've sought out vehicles of all sorts, and found them in all corners of the state. I discovered junkyards (now know as automotive recycling specialists) containing rusting hulks from the 1940s and '50s. I even discovered a whole field full of Hudson automobiles--and steam locomotives, desiel engines, interurbans, a pair of tow boats beached on the bank of the Ohio River, even the last ferry on the Wabash. Plus, I was able to capture all manner of buildings associated with transportation: depots, automobile factories, gas stations, roundhouses—as well as bridges and tunnels. I've found these relics everywhere, and I'm pleased to share them.

Journey's End - $22.00.

8.5" x 10" trade paperback, 144 pages, ISBN 978-0-9745186-5-7