"Intense light beams from outside the roundhouse stream through a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, flooding the darkened interior space. The light coming through the windows reveals a locomotive at rest in the darkened interior space, where the light filters through a cloud of steam." Curtis L. Carter, (former) director of the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, in an essay in the exhibition catalog, "Railroads and the American Landscape: Ted Rose Paintings and Photographs" (2006), p. 12-13.
Illinois Central operated steam locomotives longer than most railroads, allowing Rose as a teenager to follow his passion for steam in areas relatively near Milwaukee, his home town, where no steam existed.
"Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Rose's photography is his treatment of light. Unfailingly, he positions the light sources entering into the picture so that the light enhances the entire composition. This is true whether the light source is projecting from the front of a locomotive within the picture or from some source external to it. A masterpiece for its rendering of light is an image portraying the interior of a roundhouse of the Illilnois Central Railroad at Carbondale, Illinois." Curtis L. Carter, in an essay in the exhibition catalog, "Railroads and the American Landscape: Ted Rose Paintings and Photographs," p. 12.
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