A stallion at rest pants an odd, labored thugga-thugga-thugga-thugga as if winded after a circuit at Belmont or Churchill Downs. Yet, there will be no blanket of roses to lay across its mane, only a touch of white and a slight patina of road grime to mar her shiny black coat as the soft light of a dying day falls upon its nose.
The cadence tumbles gently over the land, drifting and swaying with each swell of the wind, never reaching its full crescendo. There is no echo across the South Plains, for there is nothing to echo off of. There is only the accompanying rhythm of wind turbine blades rushing through the dusk of an impending Texas night.
There is nothing graceful about her form. In the dim light she is sheer horsepower at rest, constrained within angular forms of function; of pent-up tractive effort waiting to break the inertia of stillness.
Half dray horse, half thoroughbred; muscular like a Belgian, yet sleek like Secretariat passing the ¾ pole at Pimlico, she waits patient, number boards illuminated, headlight dimmed for an eagerly awaited meet.
While there may be sneers and snickers cast their way, and references to kitchen counter appliances hung upon them in less-than-flattering monikers, those won’t be found this evening out on the cotton fields of Nolan County.
Among the masses there is no great reverence for the four-stroke rhythm that emanates from behind its hood doors, the bass tenor vibrating at a frequency of 450 revolutions per minute seems to permeate with great offense the senses of those who hold in high esteem the smooth resonance of a well-tuned 645.
Yet if one listens closely in the gathering twilight, hidden in the odd chant lay the faint whispers of ghosts that never knew the limitations of normal aspiration.
It’s been the better part of a generation since shiny black and yellow U25Cs rolled into Livingston on silver Trimount trucks, and 2,800 horsepower “Snails” slogged up Tehachapi and posed for the pages of McDonnell. And before Agnes wiped out the Erie Lackawanna, the yellow hammerheads of their U33Cs set the tone of design for the future.
They were sired not behind white rail fences surrounding bluegrass pastures in My Old Kentucky Home place, but on the damp and chilly south shore of Lake Erie in a facility that never had to shed a steam mindset.
They dared to compete with the crowned champion over La Grange way.
They knew the risks.
They watched ALCO die, yet didn’t flinch or bat an eye.
They innovated.
They teethed and innovated some more.
Once-rounded edges became sharper and more angular.
But most of all they persevered, their mantra being the odd labored chant of a 7FDL-16, always with a turbocharger hung on the business end of its exhaust manifold.
Here, in the dim light of a Sunday evening on the South Plains of Texas, that mantra quietly pants a mechanical homage to its ancestry---
To U-boats and C-Boats and Super 7s and Dash-8s, and to the Trimounts and GSCs and Adirondacks that carried them across a vast land.
It is the song of longevity and an ode to the forces at Juniata and Fort Worth who preen their charges and set radial truck frames onto A/C traction motors, upgrade the 24-year-old guts and gadgets that make her run, and stencil AC44C6M on her frame.
They’ll swat her on the ass while the paint is still fragrant and tacky, hitch some freight on her drawbar and let her run.
A Stallion dressed in black was bred for such things.
---RAM
Rick Malo@2025