Contemporary Views Along the First Transcontinental Railroad Richard Koenig, Professor, Kalamazoo College Begun during the summer of 2010 with the generous support of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Directions Initiative, I am making a comprehensive series of photographs along the historical route of the first transcontinental railroad. My topic combines the history and tradition of western landscape photography with the subject being the original route of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads upon completion. Just east of Promontory Summit: site of Central Pacific's Big Fill and Union Pacific's Big Trestle. The Central Pacific Railroad built east from Sacramento, California, while the Union Pacific Railroad built west from Omaha, Nebraska. The two roads met each other on May 10th 1869—just north of Great Salt Lake at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. It was a watershed moment. I want this work to be a pictorial accompaniment to well-established textual histories of the building of the railroad such as David Haward Bain's Empire Express, Maury Klein's Union Pacific Volume I, and High Road to Promontory, by George Kraus. My goal is to give the viewer as strong of a connection as possible to this historic 19th century engineering marvel through the remaining visual evidence of the human-altered landscape. Two kinds of shooting are being done while in the field—large file, multiple-image panoramas as well as a more intuitive form of shooting (hand-held, single-frame images). The work can be seen by heading to my public site here. Please contact me if you have any questions regarding this project: rkoenig@kzoo.edu