The shadows grow long on a March evening in Pecos, Texas.
It’s 6:28 pm on Saturday, and though the bustling center of the Delaware Basin oilfields doesn’t sleep, it does wind down toward day’s end.
A field pumper rolls south on now-quiet Hwy 17, his white four-wheel-drive Chevrolet pickup truck spattered with mud and wearing a layer of dust after bouncing down the rough and rutted and potholed caliche roads that have been laid out to the oil and gas wells of the Chihuahuan Desert.
It’s been a long day, and he’s covered many miles checking on the production rates of his assigned wells. He’ll make sure his field compressors are still running, the flares are lit, the burners in his heater treaters are lit and the dump valves aren’t stuck open, check the VRUs---Vapor Recovery Units, gauge his on-site oil and water storage tanks, and call in his loads to the trucking companies. If the well is already connected to a gathering pipeline system, he will take the meter readings off the transfer pump, or LACT unit---Lease Automatic Custody Transfer unit, where barrels of oil are converted to dollars and cents as they are pumped out of the on-site storage tanks and into the buyer’s pipeline.
His day started before dawn, when he relieved the night pumper. If he’s lucky and has a good wife, she packed him a full lunch box, perhaps with menudo or chorizo or asada, or pot roast or barbequed brisket or grilled chicken breast and plenty of vegetables, all to be heated up on-the-go in a plug-in-the-cigarette-lighter oven.
Around 11:30 in the morning, his breakfast tacos have worn off. He’ll find a quiet place on the edge of a lease pad miles from civilization, pull down his tailgate and enjoy his lunch amongst the creosote bush and cactus of the wide-open Pecos River Valley.
But by 6:28 pm, he’s worn out, bone-tired from the bone-jarring roads he’s spent his day on. Perhaps he’ll stop just down the road at the Burrito Depot and pick up a couple with asada con papas, stop at the Pilot truckstop and fuel up the Chevrolet and run in and get another can or two of Skoal, and head home.
And no dirty boots in the house.
He’ll slip off his steel-toed Timberlands, slip on his flip-flops, and leave the boots on the floorboard of the pickup.
Around the shower drain will swirl the essence of the Delaware Basin: Caliche dust, sweat, body odor, sulfur, and 40 API gravity crude oil.
He’ll swig down a Coors Light or two, or maybe a couple of Carta Blancas with lime, and tell his wife about his day as the kids clamor for his attention.
Sleep will come easy.
On this Saturday evening, the Pecos Valley Southern is quiet as well. A 60-year-old GP35 with a colorful past sits silent on the light iron, her prime mover switched off, gondolas and bulkhead flats of downhole casing knuckled up on her drawbar.
The old mill has come a long way from the day in 1965 when she rolled out of La Grange wearing the new Frisco image of mandarin and white paint. She would come to know the Cascade green and black of the Burlington Northern before the H1 of the BNSF.
Larry’s Truck and Electric slapped white LTEX lettering onto the cab below the road numbers, swatted her on the ass and sent her south to Texas.
Come Monday morning the crew will arrive early, and sixteen normally-aspirated cylinders will cough out their characteristic blue EMD smoke as they come to idle. Paralleling Texas Hwy 17, they’ll shove south under Interstate 20, past the Eagle’s Nest and Box House Village and Pecos Sun RV parks, passing the turnouts for two transload spurs along the way until they arrive at CTAP pipe yard, a little more than three miles from their starting point. The money making portion of the shortline stops here, where they will swap loads for empties and head back north to the small company yard alongside Union Pacific’s former T&P Toyah Subdivision mainline.
25 miles south of CTAP at Saragosa, the rails disappear into the sands of Reeves County, still pointing towards the Davis Mountains and Wild Rose Pass and the Mexican border that the initial $45,000 dollars’ worth of capital in the year 1909 never allowed J.G. Love and F.W. Johnson to realize. The line reached San Solomon Springs at Toyahvale, 40 miles south of Pecos, and stopped, there to be condemned to the same meager existence that so many desert shortlines have suffered from throughout history.
Today’s PVS is a Watco property, the company website describing it as having a trackage length of 27.8 miles, most of it covered in blown sand and Russian Thistle that has sprouted up in profusion along the roadbed. At that distance, the railheads are covered by the blacktop surface of Reeves County Road 311 as it crosses the roadbed and winds its way through the irrigated alfalfa and cotton fields of the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas.
South of there, if one knows just where to look, the old roadbed is still visible to the discerning eye. In the early 1970s, big yellow Caterpillar earthmovers---bulldozers and scrapers and graders and sheep’s-footed rollers---bit into it, ripped the heart out of it, transported it, spread it around and compacted it, and then the pavers laid the lanes of Interstate 10 across it, cutting off any hope of an old 4-4-0 rolling a rickety coach filled with tourists of ever again reaching the soothing waters of San Solomon Springs.
Time keeps ticking.
In a few hours, our pumper will shut off his blaring alarm, pour himself a cup of coffee and sit at the kitchen table and contemplate the day.
There are no Sundays in the oilfield.
---RAM
Rick Malo©2025