Perhaps there are no favorite railroads anymore.
Only favorite memories.
We cleave to remembrances of Gyralights oscillating their warning from Bloody Noses and Black Widows, of 645s juicing up Tunnel Motors as they shoulder into tonnage on Soldier Summit, and everything ‘Warbonnet.’
We were faithful almost to a fault in our affection for the local colors; John Deere Green and Cascade Green and Brunswick Green, and Chinese and Barriger and Deramus reds, the liveries that colored our youth and clouded our skies with a diesel exhaust version of Beebe’s smoldering ruins of Rome have all fallen to the boardroom floors where they lay in death throes, trampled as the investors scurried to Wall Street to reap in their post-merger profits, or on the streets of Washington as the suits were hauled before Congress to explain their failures.
A whole generation is indebted to the Flanarys and the Steinheimers and the Bensons and the Kooistras of the world; those whose style not only complimented tradition but forged a new path of creativity as they tramped about to all the places where surveyors and graders and engineers dared to lay their tracks; the still-favorite and storied pieces of railroading that still hold fascination in our hearts, locomotives in multiple toiling with tonnage on the drawbar, rolling commerce the breadth and width of a nation along water-level trackage and mountain grade.
To the betterment of all, our intrepid photographers had the courage to slide their vision into large yellow envelopes, lick a bevy of stamps, place them in the upper right corner and send a selection of their wares off to 1027 North Seventh Avenue and other houses that compiled them into eagerly awaited deliveries to our mailboxes each month.
In them we witnessed the creation of Amtrak, the death of Hiawatha, the dawn and demise of the Burlington Northern, Shouldn’t Paint So Fast, Conrail Quality, a Family of Lines, and an Armour Yellow behemoth that seemingly swallowed up half a continent and its railroads.
Alas, there are no favorite railroads anymore, the day September 11th, 1996, living forever in infamy with all those who were intimate in their youth with the Sunset Route and the Lark gray and scarlet power that highballed merchandise along Colis P. Huntington’s dream of attaining New Orleans. The once great corporate identity that was birthed along the Sacramento River and flung itself across Donner and the Great Basin and up the Siskiyous and across the Colorado at Yuma, disappeared for good into the maw that is Omaha.
But we are still drawn to it as a pilgrim to Mecca, to pay homage to those who came before us, to stand as witness while brute force mauls tonnage off the dusty expanse of the Marfa Plateau and grinds up the Paisano grade; or of a big GE leaning into the curve as it blasts up the 1.10% grade out of Strobel and around the Del Norte Mountains with merchandise bound for eastern markets.
There is still drama on the high iron, the sound of flanges squealing on the curves and of big motors raising hell to the high heavens, throbbing over the high deserts as the slack runs out and the whir of Barbers rolls by.
And still, amid the scorching exhaust and the dust and the rust filling the air, back-o-the-neck hairs standing full on end, there is nothing like it in the world.
The machinations of corporations haven’t changed that.
Rick
