Putting style back on track
Cesar Vergara, 49, is North America’s only designer specializing in trains His muscular machines hark to when image-consciousness fired up railroading
Some artists sculpt in stone. Others in clay. Cesar Vergara sculpts in trains.
Vergara is North America’s only industrial designer dedicated exclusively to styling railway equipment.
He’s based in New York as national design principal of the global engineering firm, Jacobs.
This rail- bound avocation puts Vergara in line with a legendary group of artists who, in the 1930s and ’ 40s, shaped an era of streamlining that started with trains and pulled along everything from automobiles to refrigerators. The goal: Boost sagging business by creating a buzz about a solid product lacking flash and dazzle. Vergara says that approach was right on track. And it could be again.
“ It’s sad the railways lost that knack,” says Vergara.
“ They created the whole concept of industrial design, even before the car industry.’’
Referring to three of the era’s legendary trains, he says, ‘‘ The 20th Century Limited, Broadway Limited and Zephyr were not only modern, they were futuristic. They proved making something look inviting doesn’t cost. It pays.” One example of Vergara’s drive to set trends on tracks calls on Toronto daily. Between them, VIA and Amtrak own 246 of the General Electric Genesis locomotives he styled in the early 1990s. The sleek beasts haul many of Via Rail’s 160 kilometre-perhour Quebec- Windsor corridor trains and the Toronto-New York Maple Leaf. Now the workhorse of the passenger train business, Vergara says Genesis explains much about what he does.
“ It’s really Design 101,” says Vergara.
“ It’s form following function, which is key to good industrial design. I had to work within specs that were already set, such as weight, clearances and crashworthiness.
‘‘ It was suggested it be curved in front and make use of fibreglass or composite materials. I wanted it all steel and very tight in front, giving it a look of character with a nautical feeling, like a ship’s bow.”
Vergara says working within the confines of the manufacturing process, structural safety standards and operating requirements illustrates his view that an industrial designers always subordinate art to engineering: “ My job is to make engineering look good. In this case, that produced a locomotive with a clean, somewhat Scandinavian look suggesting speed and strength. This was the first all- new passenger locomotive in 40 years and it had to be a bold
statement.’’ As much as Genesis and other creations in Vergara’s portfolio are products of art and engineering, they also result from making the right connections. He says the Genesis project happened because Amtrak’s director of engineering design, Jim Michel, sent him to see the late Graham Claytor, president of the railway, who became convinced fresh design could modernize the railway’s image.
Vergara remembers Claytor as a powerful personality who’d been head of the Southern Railway, a World War II naval hero and U. S. Secretary of the Navy, but who was unpretentious and aware styling could boost the industry he loved dearly. Claytor gave a green light Vergara’s innovation.
“ Cesar has an infectious passion that can do that,” says Jeff Warsh. Now a partner in the Trenton, N. J., government affairs and business development firm MBI GluckShaw, Warsh served from 1999 to 2002 as executive director of New Jersey Transit ( NJT), the densely- populated state’s respected equivalent of GO Transit. Warsh hired Vergara as the transit agency’s first- ever chief designer.
Recalls Warsh, “ The first time we met, I suggested Cesar join us instead of just consulting. He couldn’t believe I would turn over the empire to him and I couldn’t believe a world-class designer would join us. But this was important to me. We were facing community opposition on some projects and one of the constant complaints was, ‘ It’s ugly.’ Cesar made these things more than just tolerated.”
Vergara’s NJT projects included a new paint scheme, racy diesel engines, new stations and an impressive set of oak- and- steel benches for the Art Deco- style Secaucus Transfer station outside New York City. In addition to making them attractive, Warsh says Vergara did something else: “ He saved us money. We didn’t constantly bring in consultants to make unacceptable projects acceptable. These things run through the middle of people’s lives for decades and you have an obligation to make them beautiful.”
Vergara likes multi- faceted assignments, such as those at NJT. He describes the Northwest Talgo trains he designed for the coast-hugging Amtrak service between Vancouver, Seattle and Portland, Oreg. He gave them fins to visually unite the high locomotives with the low-slung so, as he says, they wouldn’t look like strings of Chihuahuas trailing St. Bernards. The wave- like fins earned the Talgo its nickname of Bat Train.
Vergara also designed the exterior and interior paint scheme — green, chocolate and double latte, he calls it — and the layout of the cars, right down to the furniture and crescent- shaped bar in the bistro car.
Says Vergara, “ I continued the exterior look into the cars to make the experience complete from the moment you first see the train until you step off at the end of your trip. One of my greatest pleasures came from an elderly Canadian passenger who said, ‘ Young man, I think it’s been 50 years since anyone has designed a train from A to Z.’”
If Vergara’s products are diverse, they are no more so than his background and his journey to this unique station in life. But it didn’t start with a boyhood love of trains. The 49- year- old says, “ My father is an architect who designed stations for the Mexico City subway system and many public schools. I was exposed at an early age to drawing and architecture. My father used to take me to the preserved studio of the great muralist, Diego Rivera, and to his own construction sites and archaeological digs. Mexico is a country of very bold and colourful styles.”
Vergara’s mother encouraged his artistic bent and kept him stocked with drawing supplies. The conversion to rail advocate came after his family moved to Washington, D. C., and he went off to design school in Sweden. There he saw a different approach to transportation and its consequences for society.
“ As is not unusual in Europe, I didn’t have a car and I went everywhere by bicycle, transit or train,” says Vergara. “There, trains are part of the answer, not part of the problem. And they’re part of the mindset. I could see trains were good for society and I wanted to be involved in helping them make a greater contribution. I also thought most were awful looking.”
Vergara’s first opportunity to change that came when he worked for the firm styling Sweden’s X-2000 high- speed passenger train.
Subsequent ventures included a stint as chief designer for the Mexican national railway, a superFrench TGV highspeed train and graphics for the Washington, D. C. Circulator bus system. The latest design from Vergara’s studio is a badger-faced mate for his Genesis, which GE Transportation Systems has dubbed its Next Generation Passenger Locomotive. Vergara calls it “ a revolutionary machine with advanced technology under its skin. I wanted it to look as advanced on the outside as it is inside.” An unseen advance in the Next Generation is how Vergara designed the rakish thoroughbred: “ I still like to draw and work with paper and cardboard. I’m from that pre-computer era when it was like being a craftsman in the medieval guild tradicoaches tion.
‘‘ But the people here at Jacobs got me a tablet computer that is really a marvellous thing; no comparison with the old CAD systems.”
Vergara’s computer has three million colours and 7,500 tools, allowing him to load a sketch or photograph and draw over it, reshaping it as if working with clay.
Yet, Vergara admits, his latest iron horse was first sired in sketches and cutouts. He says anything you can do with paper, you can do with steel. That means no compound curves, only flat planes and sections of cones and cylinders. No matter the tools or the project, Vergara says he’s fortunate to be coupled to an industry that pays him to articulate his visions. He asserts, “The love affair with the car is finite. A recent Scientific American
article said it will take thousands of little solutions to give us the big one for urban sprawl, over- dependence on cars and vanishing oil.
‘‘ One of those little solutions could be making our industry more attractive. We don’t need any more ugly things in this world and it costs as much to build an ugly train as an attractive one. My whole career is built on that belief.” Greg Gormick is Toronto-based contributing editor of the trade magazine Railway Age.