Pacific Electric. 2024 © Scott Banks One hundred photographs, displayed here in a slide show controlled by arrows, in a continuous loop.
Southern Californians are often surprised to learn that the greater Los Angeles area—from the San Fernando Valley to Redlands to Newport Beach—was in 1923 traversable by over 1,100 miles of electric railway. These were the Big Red Cars of the Pacific Electric Railway. The first electric railway tracks were laid in 1887, and despite postwar competition from automobiles and bus lines, the last of this railway did not fall into disuse until 1961. (See Chapter 2 of this book for more.)
In this project, I retrace the San Bernardino route of this historic railway, which begins in what is now the Pacific Electric Lofts apartment building in downtown Los Angeles and ends in the parking lot of the recently demolished Carousel Mall in San Bernardino. As much as possible, I attempt to site the camera where a passenger would be sitting if the railway remained. I use a ladder to approximate the height, and place it where the track would have been. This is often easy to discover, as much of the former railway ran along a broad meridian that still exists along its various streets. Another section runs briefly along an existing railroad track, and a long section is currently the Pacific Electric bicycle trail. Part of the former track closest to Los Angeles is obscured now by freeway, so I am not able to do much there.
An initial set of fifty photographs documents the ride out to San Bernardino. I place myself on the left-hand side of the imagined train car, so most of the photographs face north on the outgoing trip and face south on the inbound trip. The actual train would have taken two hours for each leg of the journey. I am not able to take the photographs in a mere two hours, as a passenger would. Instead, I must make dozens of trips to various stretches of the train path by car and by bicycle (with a bicycle trailer to carry the ladder). I time my photographs to reflect the approximate time when the train would be in each location, assuming a trip start time of 9am. By choosing cloudless summer days, I am able to capture the movement of the sun from the morning start to the midmorning arrival. I do the same for fifty photographs representing a return trip, hypothesizing a journey that begins at 2pm.
The slideshow displays all hundred photos in order, with the turnaround made evident by two photos of the same parking lot in immediate succession, facing different directions as my hypothetical passenger switches seats to stay on the left-hand side of the streetcar.