Gold in The West
There is still gold in The West, and a rent in the curtain of winter clouds has allowed the blue heavens to shine through briefly, a reminder that even in the modern and dreary days life goes on and trains still roar past the decaying descendants of Western Union, flurries tickling FRED and swirling in his wake as coast-bound merchandise races a prairie snow squall along the most storied of rights-of-way.
It is where range grasses still sprout forth, first greeting the world through a sprinkling of cinders deposited trackside by the passage
of uncountable examples of Harriman Standard design dragging transcontinental tonnage and sooting the Nebraska skies and the line poles at Lodgepole as the nation eagerly awaited what was on the drawbar.
There is still magic here, the words “Overland Route” conjuring up images of hand-hewn cottonwood crossties laid down by Jack Casement’s army of hearty and filthy souls as they raced west, pushed along by the machinations of Crédit Mobilier and those gathered in the plush and gilt of Thomas Durant’s private varnish. It is where settlers rolled, braving the stagnant and stifling air of the emigrant cars by the thousands as they set forth to vanquish the frontier wilderness of the American West, drawn to the promise of riches in California and good soils and multiple marriages in Deseret. But the rails carried style as well, and the well-to-do were treated to just that in the timecarding of The Overland Limited as it carried Lords and Ladies and lovers of luxury between the trade markets of Chicago and the ferry boats of San Francisco Bay, its patrons thrilling to the legend of Jarrett & Palmer’s Lightning Express, sipping on whatever beverage appropriate as they gently rocked ever westward amongst the finest plush rugs and upholstered chairs and gleaming woodwork that George Pullman could provide.
Indeed, the nation’s business no longer flows in dots and dashes along green glass insulators, and the final haunting moans of a 9000-class have long since faded over the Great Plains as she bared her heart and soul through a brass chime, her three-beat exhaust flushing hoot owls and hawks from the crossarms as friction-bearing Bettendorfs laden with goods tested the mettle of 67-inch drivers and 220lbs of boiler pressure. For near thirty years the class proved themselves as faithful servants to both those who crewed her and those in the halls at Omaha, yet the wave of yellow-painted diesels would send all but one of the 88 to scrap, the primordial process of fire-boiling-water stood-down by the compression of hot diesel and the expectations of profits on the company ledger.
The gas turbines and big double diesels racked up the double-track miles here, Big Blows and U50s and DDs and an ALCo oddball toiling away in an endless horsepower war as they rolled fast freight across the nation, ceding in time to multiples of Fast Forties living up to their name with the Overland Mail and other symbol merchandise stretched out on the drawbar, running 80-per in hot competition with semi-trucks on nearby Interstate 80.
Today, under the fast-moving clouds of an Arctic cold front howling across the Great Plains of Nebraska, the two toughest kids on the block, EMD and GE, team up 3rd Generation SDs with GEVOs to feed the maw of the global economy as they speed seemingly endless strings of shipping containers, stacked two high in hollow well cars, to and from bottlenecked ports at Los Angeles and Long Beach, each filled with items to satiate the hunger of modern consumerism and trade deficits.
Long gone are the solid strings of orange PFE refers freighting out the bounty of the San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys to the rest of the nation, and long gone too are the boomer brass pounders that sent out orders for the legendary Silk Train, the wires that once carried the business of the world now dangling loosely and singing only with the wind. They are ghosts, legends in their own right cast aside by progress and left only to memory and the decay of time and nature.
And someday, perhaps all that is in sight will succumb as well. There are, after all, certain inevitabilities.
But for today, standing fully within the Golden Age of the Here and Now, there is still magic.
And, as the late afternoon sky of a chill and blustery January day would suggest---
There is still gold in The West.
Rick Malo©2022
