Glacial Errata, No. 36

One

Every so often in a city you’ll come across the remnants of train tracks, half-exposed and half-obliterated. I always love these; one of those vague ephemera that make up a city. Something both totally unremarkable and yet, in its own way, filled with an uncanny sense of history.

Most of these images are from downtown Los Angeles; one is from Baltimore.

Two

I can’t say why I find these so fascinating, but it has something to do with the reminder that every city is built up of layers, like sedimentary rock, overlaid upon each other and compacted over time into the thing that now surrounds you. You see the city as it now is, while also getting the slightest glimpse of what it once was—how it was once laid out, where things might have been designed to go. Not enough to form anything close to a clear picture, but enough to know that, once, things were different.

Three

Given how rigidly gridded most cities are these days, it’s also striking to see these diagonal slashes across the street, suggesting other ways in which a place was once organized. One of those moments in which you realize that the pathways of rail lines are so distinct from those of cars. Particularly in a place like Los Angeles, these echoes of a former city and their haunting presence may account for the stubborn persistence of the conspiracy theory beliefs that Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is based on a true story. (It’s not.)

Four

But it is also the natural tendency of railroad tracks, as a set of parallel lines, to draw your eye towards their vanishing point. And yet a hallmark of these ghost tracks is that they literally go nowhere. It’s as if a basic element of composition was once in use here, but has long since abandoned. Where does your eye go, then?

Five

I love cities because there’s always a constant sense of reinvention, of making the place anew, and yet for all the destruction and the obliteration of the past, it’s almost never complete—there’s always some kind of trace or marking of what once was. This is mostly just an issue of laziness and economics—these tracks don’t get removed entirely because it would be a significant hassle, and they aren’t a problem if left as it is. Those of us who care about things like urban archeology, I suppose, always benefit from those things that are both not harming anyone and also a total pain in the ass to deal with. And as a result, these kinds of calculations mean there will always be small reminders of the strata of former cities.