Welcome back to the Front Porch.
You have probably heard the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
I’ve been thinking lately that sometimes a picture does something else. More than that.
Sometimes it tells you where to find the words.
That thought came back to me recently while working on something you may never think much about when looking at a finished illustration . . . . Just what should a steam locomotive arriving at a small Ozarks town in 1904 actually look like?
Seems like a simple enough question, doesn’t it?
Put a locomotive on some railroad tracks, add a station, maybe a few people standing around, and there you go. Well — apparently — that isn’t how things work around here.
Because once I started looking more closely at the trains that would have traveled through Honey Hill Country at the beginning of the twentieth century, one question led to another. And another. And another . . . . And then another.
Before long, I was looking into steam locomotives and passenger cars, freight cars and railroad crossings, station platforms and loading areas, horse-drawn wagons and mule teams, and the wooden water tanks that stood alongside railroad tracks all across the country.
All of this, mind you, because I wanted to create a true-to-the-period image of a train.
Funny thing is, I had been down this road before — although the first time, there wasn’t a train anywhere in sight.
The Front Porch by James Milson 