After Promontory: 150 Years of Transcontinental Railroading

The Mildred Westervelt Warner Transportation Museum has a new exhibit, After Promontory: 150 Years of Transcontinental Railroading, opening on May 23, 2023 and running through September 9, 2023, is on loan from and in collaboration with the Center for Railroad Photography and Art. After Promontory takes a wide view, considering the events at Promontory to be the start of a larger phenomenon, an entire era of transcontinental railroad construction that stretched for nearly fifty years. Photography is After Promontory’s literal and metaphorical lens on the transcontinental railroad boom. Both the book and the exhibition feature period photographs by some of the most ac­complished photographers in the nation’s history, artists such as William Henry Jackson, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, and Car­leton E. Watkins. Their photographs were often created with the sponsorship of the railroads, whose leaders saw photogra­phy as a medium suitable for lobbying a distant population (and distant political leaders) on the need for public support and assistance.