The Union Express Locomotive surf
Timmy Curran explores the railroads that snake along his state for an alternative slice of celluloid, The Union Express.
More like this...
Josh Landan loves trains. “You can just cruise,” he says. “You don’t sit in traffic. You can read a book or do work or take a nap. And it’s cheap.” Landan also loves surfing and cinematography, so it was only natural he’d eventually combine all three.
“I wanted to film something that anyone can do — anyone can hop on the train and surf the spots along the way. That was appealing to me because most surf movies are filmed in locations that are exotic and expensive to get to, but a train is an economical way to take a surf trip.”
The Union Express was Timmy Curran’s idea. “I thought the Pacific Surfliner would be a really cool and easy way to check out the Southern California coast,” says the retired pro surfer-turned-musician. “Just taking a trip from Ventura to Lompoc and seeing that coastline sounded really interesting, and I thought, ‘Well, why don’t we just take it all the way?’ I knew we could get some beautiful shots, so I talked to Josh and told him about the idea and he immediately said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it’.”
With a newborn daughter and plenty of time to be spent in his home state, Curran thought about visiting his pro surfer friends along the coast. He learned that Amtrak, America’s national rail line, had a 350 mile-long passenger route called Pacific Surfliner that stretched from San Diego to San Luis Obispo, stopping in surfy cities like Oceanside, San Clemente, and Santa Barbara. But for Curran, the ten-year-old route was new — he’d only ridden trains in Europe and Japan.
In late 2008 at Los Angeles’ Union Station, along with Ben Bourgeois, Curran and Landan boarded Amtrak’s Coast Starlight; ten hours later they arrived in San Jose, where Keith Malloy awaited with a car. For the next week they ripped frigid windswell wedges at a San Mateo County nude-beach nook and lucked into some shapely sandbars at Ocean Beach in San Francisco.
For the next two years Curran and Landan worked southward with calculated, individual trips, spending considerable time aboard the roomy Pacific Surfliner cars. “Before we started this film, I was thinking business class would be good for more room,” says Curran. “But compared to an aeroplane, I discovered that a coach seat on Amtrak is huge.”
For the full interview, check out HUCK#021, out now.
Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £20 (UK) / £43 (EU) / £58 (Rest of the World).
The Union Express (text) by Michael Kew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments (1)
Please note: Your comment may be held in moderation for approval by an administrator to prevent spamming. This usually doesn't take long, please be patient.