Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific #20

The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad Company, which at its height in the late 1910s operated over 10,000 miles of track from the upper Midwest to the Pacific Coast, had by the late 1970s divested itself by two-thirds. In this photograph, part of his series Westward the Course of Empire, Ruwedel pictures an abandoned, overgrown railway bed. The soft carpet of grasses suggests a natural reclamation of the land, terrain which remains nonetheless transfigured by the human quest for wealth and power.