The steepest grade on U.S. main-line track is at the small town of Saluda, on a Norfolk Southern route between Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Asheville, North Carolina. The grade goes on for three miles at a slope of 4 or 5 percent. Trains have not been running on the line since 2001, but the tracks are still maintained.
For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural Midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room. This is because the land is so flat that there is nothing to impede or gradualize the sun's appearance. It's just all of a sudden there.
But in the past couple of years, Brennan believes that tablets have caught up, with apps such as Apple’s ProCreate and Morpholio’s Trace becoming far more responsive to the user’s marks. “Tablets didn’t used to have that immediate response, from brain to eye to hand to pen to paper. A half-second delay has a huge impact on how you think — it causes you to stumble. But now that lag’s gone, it’s almost the same as drawing with pen on paper. You don’t need to engage with the airbrushes or other features — just use it in its purest form.” The stylus, too, far more convincingly apes a manual pen: “You’re able to tune it to almost replicate your favourite pen — and it doesn’t run out of ink.
Chetwood is an iPad devotee, using it to produce fantastical urban artworks as well as architecture. Far from hindering the drawing process, he believes tablets will give rise to a new era of creative drawing. “A lot of people say technology and computers are taking away the true art of drawing. That’s rubbish, it releases sketching. You can move so much quicker and change things much more quickly, and it keeps a record of what you’re doing. The control is just brilliant.” The polished glass surface is the only flaw, but textured acetates applied to the screen can make it feel more like paper.