The modern era was really kicked off with, first, the photograph, and then, the "moving pictures". Early film makers often used trains, as they showed movement like nothing else and could help captivate audiences. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery was considered a milestone in film technique. Buster Keaton's 1927 film, The General, was a great moving picture that used a steam locomotive more as a member of the cast than as a prop. Some of the greatest shots of steam locomotives in history are from Keaton's film, including a spectacular wreck, (using a real locomotive).

It is in these above mentioned ways that the early movies and the steam locomotive are directly linked together, and both symbols of true modernism. This painting is slightly older than some of the others, (produced in 2006), but it deals with the same ideas of movement and modernism.