On Monday I did an afterwork sketch of the closed Atherton Station on the Caltrain route and now on Friday I headed to North Burlingame to do another after work sketch of a Caltrain station: Broadway.

With a name like Broadway, you’d think of a busy station with lots of passenger traffic and a station with a staffed ticket office, a waiting room lined with wooden benches, and perhaps a cafe. Sure that might have been the picture over 70 years ago. Now here is the ticket window:

And there is no cafe. And no passengers for that matter.

Like Atherton, the new electric EMUs speed by this station. The train only stops here on weekends, which is more than can said for Atherton, and the former station is now a restaurant. The platform has some benches, a few shelters, and a sign that reads “No Loitering”. Is sketching a form of loitering?

The Broadway Station suffers from diminishing ridership and a center loading island platform for northbound trains. This means that a hold-out rule is in effect which means that if a train is in the station, a train heading in the opposite direction must wait outside the station until the other leaves before pulling in. This creates delays and is a major reason the station was closed on weekdays on August 1, 2005.

The original station was opened by Southern Pacific in 1911. The station was renamed Buri Buri in 1917 and then to its current name in 1926.

Sketching Notes

During my lunch I sketched out the scene I wanted to sketch on an index card. This is like a storyboard for a tricky scene in a film. What I wanted to do was convey a sense of stillness and motion. The stillness of the shelter and the motion of the train speeding by. In the presketch, or storyboard, I exaggerated the lines of the train. They are curved and kinetic while the shelter remains calm and pedestrian.

Perhaps I could have exaggerated the lines more in my field sketch. That would entail sketching things that aren’t there in front of me. Like sketching in another dimension.