There is never nothing---
Except in the absence of patience.
A beautiful Sunday, December 29th, 2024 evening in Lipscomb County, Texas.
A summer evening sees a westbound rumble across the Cuyler Street overpass in Pampa, Texas.
A cottage by the tracks.
Pampa, Texas.
Marooned
The trains rumble by without stopping---
The mainline switch has long been removed, as has the derail.
Once the rusted light rails were hoisted from their berth upon the deteriorating tie plates, and the rotting ties removed, the mainline was aligned and leveled, maintainers manicuring the ballast and the blades of earth movers mercilessly cutting into the old weed-grown roadbed of the spur and removing all traces of the connection, grading out the profile of the trackside ditch as if nothing ever existed.
In its stead, 136-lb rail of the continuously-welded variety lays seamlessly where once a frog and point rails diverted slat-sided stock cars and covered hoppers onto the spur.
The stock cars have long since been pushed through the gates of some scrapyard somewhere and met their fate; the railroads no longer in the business of moving livestock. And grain is now shipped in 110-car unit trains that ferry the cargo from one super elevator to the next, where it can be trucked to final destinations such as the Cattle Town Feedlot.
The severed connection has left a lone survivor---
A castaway entombed under the vast Texas skies, its hood doors open, hinges rusted, squeaking oddly in the frigid winter winds; lifeblood spilling down the sidesills, shattered panes impotent to keep out the snows and rains and the clouds of dust that might choke out an engineer and brakeman in a cab whose cushions will never again know their weight.
It has been left to languish---
Obscurity of the 80-ton variety, the Whitcomb nameplate long-since chiseled from its form, the uncapped muffler acting as a rain gauge, funneling the storms of springtime down into the cylinders and rendering them useless---
The open knuckle of the Typer-E waiting to grasp onto a shipment that will never arrive---
And the damaged stepwell never to know repair.
As if to add insult to injury, the brisk northeasterly wind ushering in the bone-chilling cold of a mid-February day, blows itself over the fetid feedlot aromas of massed bovines and their excrement as hundreds of Angus cattle gorge themselves at the feed trough in an unknowing effort to boost their sale weight.
And while 29 degrees Fahrenheit is decidedly less pungent than might be the case if it where a 110-degree summer day on the High Plains of Texas, the southwest side of Cattle Town is no place for the faint of heart.
For certain, the evening’s hot shower was especially luxurious.
---RAM
Rick Malo©2024
Whitcomb 80D center cab switcher at Cattle Town Feedlot along the BNSF Transcon near Summerfield, Texas.
February 16th, 2024.
October light.
The landscape of the Llano Estacado wears the typical dun coloring of Autumn---
The grasses, parched from the summer sun and dry winds, have given up their olive tones for the more seasonally appropriate grays and golden tans---
The blue-greens of the trackside Russian Thistle---the Scourge of the High Plains---now turned various shades of brown as their woody stems begin to weaken and hollow, soon to reach the breaking point as a stiff breeze snaps it off at ground level, sending it tumbling across the land, sowing its seedpods and piling up against fences, carrying on its never ending battle with the farmers and ranchers who not only seek to eradicate it from their pastures and fields, but from existence all together.
The late-October sun hovers just above the western horizon, creating a beautiful evening in the Texas Panhandle, casting a gorgeous light upon everything it touches.
With sun visor down to protect his eyes from the glare, the engineer aboard ES44C4 8049 charges his westbound intermodal train through Kingsmill on the Panhandle Subdivision of BNSF's Transcon, and directly into the setting sun as he heads for the end of his run in Amarillo, where he'll hand the hotshot off to a Hereford Subdivision crew who will forward it further west.
It will be dark in the Mountain Time Zone when it reaches Belen
The monochrome demons fought hard for this one---
And lost.
The southerly gale that had been raging across the barren fields of the South Plains has deposited enough red dirt into the western sky to provide ample filtering for the late evening sun to cast muted tones of copper and gold across the landscape of the northern reaches of the Llano Estacado.
Here, in a bit of Indian Summer light of a late-October evening, before the chill of November falls upon the land, we see a moment stopped in time at the Carson County line---
A Peterbilt rolling west on US60, its Heil tanker filled with gasoline and diesel---the lifeblood of the nation---heading off to fill the underground tanks at the Allsup’s in White Deer or the Cefco in Panhandle, so the motorists on their way to Amarillo or Borger or Clarendon can stop at the pump, tap their card, and check Facebook while the nozzle flows fuel into their Subaru or jacked-up GMC with the loud pipes.
And the Gawd-awful ugly International Pro Star rolling east at 70mph with its empty flatbed in search of a load, driver with his earbuds in, pissed off beyond all git up as he listens to the dispatcher explain why there aren’t any loads for him in Texas, but he better have his ‘ain’t-showered-in-three-days’ ass in Wellington, Kansas at 8 o’clock in the morning to strap on a load going to Des Moines. And don’t forget to tarp it.
And then there’s the Transcon---
Four ribbons of continuously-welded steel that angle across the Panhandle of Texas from Farwell on the New Mexico state line, through Canyon and Amarillo and Panhandle and Pampa and Canadian, finally dumping itself into Oklahoma a mile east of Higgins, Texas.
For almost the entirety of its Texas presence, US Highway 60 parallels the BNSF Transcon at close quarters, the roadway being a major artery for commerce on the High Plains, bisecting on a southwest-northeast axis 10 counties and the cattle ranches and feedlots and the feed corn and milo and cotton fields of the Panhandle.
It’s 6:27 on the evening of October 30th, 2024, and the highway is at its busiest---
A somewhat more leisurely pace than that of Interstate 40 which runs 19 miles to the south.
And while it is commonplace to see license plates from Oklahoma and Kansas and New Mexico on a regular basis, the majority of the traffic is local---
Farmers and ranchers out to check on their fields and pastures, the employees of Pantex hitting the highway at the beginning and end of their workday; grandma and grandpa heading into Amarillo for their doctor’s appointment---
And the occasional railfan stopping to witness the grand procession of trains.
With the grain elevators of White Deer in the distance, a fast eastbound intermodal train tops the slight grade out of a sag just at the west end of the siding at Kingsmill, Texas. She’ll be upon us in a flash at 70 mph, and with green on the board for a westbound, we won’t have long to wait for another train.
Perhaps someday our railfan will make it to Cajon or Tehachapi---
Perhaps not.
There’s a pretty good show right here in his own backyard.
---RAM
As an eastbound intermodal train observes the 10-mph slow order as it rolls down Main Track 1 on Friday evening, March 1st, 2024, BNSF crews are working hard to repair the fire-damaged trackage of Main 2 on the Canadian River bridge in Canadian, Texas. The Smokehouse Creek wildfire put both tracks out of commission on Tuesday, February 27th when it roared through the area and surrounded the town of Canadian. By sunrise on Saturday, March 2nd, both tracks will be operational.
The evening of July 7-8, 2023, proved to be a stormy one for the panhandle of Texas. Powerful thunderstorms moved through the area dumping several inches of rain.
With more storm clouds looming in the western skies, at 7:14 on the morning of the 8th, an eastbound hotshot finds a brief bit of sunlight as it tops the grade out of the Canadian River valley at Coburn, Texas.
GEs still got the stroke!
A quartet of old Dash-9s show the world that they still have what it takes to a roll fast hotshot across the Transcon. Wearing two different paint schemes and smoking up the evening skies at Pampa, Texas, four old GEs shake the ground as they storm eastbound over the Cuyler Avenue bridge at 6:04pm on July 18th, 2024.
While 'GP50' may be stenciled on her frame, the 3031 is pure EMD GP40X, having arrived on the AT&SF roster in June of 1978 as their number 3801. At 5:00 pm on Friday, April 5th, 2024, she's at Black, Texas in charge of the afternoon westbound local out of Amarillo as a fast train of eastbound autoracks breezes past on Main Track 2.
A north wind ushers in the chill of winter and the familiar throb of four-stroke horses as they labor with eastbound tonnage at Higgins, Texas. The office is empty, as are the grain bins, and trucks no longer roll across the old Fairbanks-Morse scale. Even the ghosts have left, leaving the place to the hoot owls as they savor their nightly gourmet of field mice.
Run 8 at 507.
It's 7:58pm on May 18th, 2024, as SD70ACe 9303 charges east with containers on the drawbar at milepost 507 on the Transcon near Kingsmill, Texas.
At approximately 2:20 pm on February 26th, 2024, the Smokehouse Creek fire sparked in the dry grasses north of Stinnett, Texas. Fanned by strong west winds, the fire spread east and by the afternoon of Tuesday, February 27th had burned through 60 miles of Texas and encircled the town of Canadian, cutting off the escape routes and setting fire to the creosote ties atop BNSF's twin bridges across the Canadian River.
At 7:20 pm on Friday, March 1st, 2024, crews are still working feverishly to repair the decking on the Main Track 2 bridge as ES44C4 6558 observes the 10-mph slow order on the newly reopened Main Track 1 as it rolls eastbound containers over the Canadian River.
After midnight, the repairs will be completed and the bridge reopened to traffic.
In the Valley of the Red Deer on a fine autumn 2023 morning, ES44DC 7786 and 9-44CW 718 roll a westbound train past placid waters near Miami, Texas.
A bright Sunday morning down at the barn sees a trio of grimy GEs rolling westbound containers fast across the Llano Estacado near Black, Texas. May 2022.
Into the storm.
On Sunday afternoon, May 19th, 2024, an eastbound grain train rolls across the sage and grasses of Lipscomb County, Texas and slips underneath a massive thunderstorm that would spawn several tornados over Oklahoma.
"...stays mainly in the Plain."
A mighty Texas thunderstorm drenches 6932 as it rolls merchandise west on the Transcon at Coburn on the afternoon of May 19th, 2024.
A shelter in the storm.
A Canadian National unit brings up the rear of a westbound unit ethanol train early on the stormy morning of June 12th, 2023 at Cuyler, Texas.
Zipping along.
On a warm 2024 winter evening, JB Hunt containers in a westbound BNSF intermodal train breeze past the landscape as they roll down Main Track 2 coming off the Canadian River bridge in Canadian, Texas.
“Now, one of these days
I’m gonna climb that mountain
Walk up there among them clouds
Where the cotton’s high
And the corn’s a-growin’
And there ain’t no fields to plow…”
It's been a long time since this brace of old Case tractors busted the sod of the High Plains around White Deer, Texas. They've given up the farm life, moved to town and picked out a plot of choice real estate near the tracks to enjoy their retirement years sipping lemonade and watching the trains speed through town, conjuring up memories of the Madame Queen and her ilk of 2-10-4s flashing their 74-inch drivers as they sped tonnage across the Texas panhandle.
And then there were the ALco PAs roaring through, smoking up the skies with the San Francisco Chief on the drawbar.
Ahhhh.....
The good ol' days.
Where have they gone?
At 3:49 on the cloudy Sunday afternoon of January 21st, 2024, they'll just have to settle for ES44DC 7500 and SD70ACe 9067 rolling another westbound stack train in a seemingly endless procession of stack trains that speed across the Transcon, their diesel motors throbbing like a hearbeat---
The steel rails as an artery carrying the lifeblood of commerce in a never-ending flow of east-west traffic.
The lemonade is good, and as old-timers are wont to do, they complain about everything "new-fangled."
But they still rise up and take notice when the trains come to town.
On the damp and cool evening of October 10th, 2022, a westbound intermodal train slips through Tolar, New Mexico and tips over the western edge of the Llano Estacado, beginning its decent to Fort Sumner and the Pecos River.
Paneless.
GP40X 3031 is seen through the windows of the long-shuttered used car dealer as the unit switches the grain track at Black, Texas on the Hereford Subdivision on the Friday afternoon of April 5th, 2024.
Steel ribbons and wild plum.
The wild Chickasaw Plum in full bloom tells that Spring has arrived on the rolling grasslands of the far northeastern Texas Panhandle. It's 6:48 pm, March 30th, 2024 along BNSF's Transcon as one of the ubiquitous GE Dash-9s tops the grade at MP431 with a long string of eastbound containers on the drawbar.
/\Coming and going. Westbound. Coburn, Texas. March 2nd, 2024. 6:13pm.\/
On a fine summer afternoon in 2023, the DPUs of a westbound unit tank train charge through White Deer, Texas on BNSF's Panhandle Subdivision.
The dispatcher in Fort Worth has weaved the Pampa Local into the fabric of westbound intermodal and grain trains, giving the pint-sized hotshot an opening to hot-foot it from Panhandle back to Amarillo late on the afternoon of September 18th, 2023.
DUPing it out on the Plains.
GE muscle brings up the rear of an eastbound grain train near White Deer, Texas on a February 2024 morning.
As a huge thunderstorm moves of towards Oklahoma, the late evening summer sun breaks out of the clouds and highlights a westbound freight passing eastbound tank cars on the Transcon somewhere between Higgins and Glazier, Texas.
It is late
The sun teeters on the escarpment
Rays bending over the ramparts
To caress the golden grasses of winter
Light and shadow sway gentle on a whisper of breeze
A rumble underfoot
Throbbing cylinders gasp for breath
Turbochargers whine on the wind
A great howling of voltage surging
Urging traction motors onward…ONWARD!
Rippling the cold air with hot exhaust
A rush
A whir of roller bearings
The spange of steel on steel
Echoes in the valley
She’s by in a flash
To fade into night
Still, yet to come
The moon on silver rails
Lights the trail
Home
Eastbound on a Summer dusk near Coburn, Texas.
Making hay at Kingsmill.
Early on a beautiful Summer 2023 morning, eastbound Erie horsepower rolls past natural horsepower stored at the Maul Feed & Seed yard in Kingsmill, Texas.
The last rays of the sun caress the cloud tops as a fast westbound freight storms down the Transcon at Glazier, Texas on a 2023 summer Saturday evening.
Morning meet at Panhandle, Texas.
For eons, the Canadian River has flowed eastward from the Sangre de Cristos, etching along the northern scarp of the Llano Estacado and depositing its sand and silt to points downstream.
And, for just as many eons, the west winds have scoured the dusty surface of the Llano, carrying seedpods and soils aloft and dropping them once again to earth over what are now the Plains of Oklahoma and the eastern Texas Panhandle.
Over the millennia, Nature has sculpted and contoured the land of Lipscomb County, Texas. Bluestem grasses and sage carpeted the sandhills, punctuated here and there with dwarf yucca and wild plum. Lightning-sparked range fires burned out the trees and less-hearty invaders, leaving the native growth to recover quickly and thrive.
Less than two centuries ago, the bison roamed here, as did the Kiowa and the Comanche.
Only 3,000 people reside within its 932 square miles, and, for the most part, they have chosen to leave the land as they found it: An austere example of wild and rolling frontier beauty.
Here, as afternoon storm clouds ride a February west wind, the 6942 stares down a yellow approach signal as it rumbles gently across the grasses of Lipscomb County, the bluestem wearing its seasonal rust color, the sage dry and muted, and the dwarf yucca sprouting from the red sandy earth; an earth that in all likelihood was transported grain-by-grain on the west winds from somewhere up on the Llano.
Now, only Angus and Hereford roam behind barbed wire fences, and GEs and EMDs are confined to twin steel ribbons on a roadbed hacked out of the sand by horse-drawn implements over a century ago. And rubber-tired traffic on adjacent Hwy 60 is mostly local in nature and sporadic at best.
While the pace of life in Lipscomb County might not be defined as ‘leisurely’, it is decidedly less than ‘bustling’.
Most residents prefer it that way.
Perhaps it was a fitting day to stop.
Cold.
Gray.
Silent.
Signals dark.
Main tracks empty.
Visitors from every road fill the siding---
Standing-to in the January chill to quietly pay their respects.
I did not know them.
But their families did.
Their fellow railroaders did.
They come and mourn them---
Place flowers---
And leave with only memories.
There is no solace found on the cold Panhandle wind.
Nor answers.
Lara G. Taylor
Cody Owens
KP Smith, Jr
June 28th, 2016.
BNSF.
Panhandle, Texas.
With fast eastbound containers on the drawbar, five GE motors blaze a trail over the crest of the grade at Cuyler, Texas at 4:50 on the chilly afternoon of January 19th, 2024.
The sun rises across the sage of Hemphill County, Texas as an eastbound stack train slips away towards Oklahoma on Memorial Day 2022.
Winter dress on The Plains.
Westbound near Glazier, Texas.
A rainy night in Texas.
An eastbound hotshot rolls fast across Purcell Avenue in Canadian, Texas at 4:33 on the cold and rainy morning of January 5th, 2024.
Shadows at Cuyler.
"Against the grain."
Cuyler, Texas.
"Hey! Pass me by..."
The words of Johnny Rodriguez hums in the rush of cars and the throbbing tempo of GEVOS heading in opposite directions---
It's been many years since diesel was 5 cents a gallon---
Time has surely passed by and left the old gas station in the dust of the Llano Estacado---
The door is padlocked---
The tree is decorated---
The junk for sale is at rock-bottom, season-ending clearance prices---
But the sales staff have all headed home for the Holidays, leaving the errant and interested traveler to explore light and shadows and shutter speed all by himself out on the edge of Pampa, Texas.
On a chilly November 2023 morning, a westbound stack train rolls past a placid stock tank as it works its way up the Red Deer Creek valley west of Miami, Texas.
SD70ACe 9167 speeds past the signals at Coburn, Texas as it rolls merchandise west along the Transcon.
It's 3:33 on the crystal-clear afternoon of Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 and we're looking straight up W. Purcell Avenue in Canadian, Texas as engineer Jeff Ford rolls the H KCKBEL1 05 manifest west through town on the BNSF Transcon. The Hemphill County courthouse is in the left distance.
The DPU of an eastbound grain train slips past the crossovers at Coburn, Texas and heads into a thunderstorm early on a July 2023 morning.
A crystal Autumn evening
Of golden light
And cobalt skies
Yonder comes the train
A dash of goods
Coast-bound
To make haste across the Plains
Into the sun
Towards night again
Following headlight's beam
Aglow on polished steel
Twin ribbons
An aged destiny
Autumn on The Plains.
A westbound hotshot rolls fast down the Transcon near Cuyler, Texas on the cloudy morning of November 9th, 2023.
Soon to be celebrating their 33rd birthday, former BNSF SD60Ms 1441 & 1451 roll the Pampa-Waynoka local east through the Red Deer Creek valley near Miami, Texas on the morning of November 22nd, 2023.
With a solid block of tank cars on the drawbar, a clean pair of SD60Ms roll the eastbound Pampa-Waynoka local across the rolling grasslands of Hemphill County, Texas at Coburn early on the morning of November 22nd, 2023.
Dog Days
To dream of youth
Hazy memories of days without end
We wanted to go everywhere
And do everything
To saddle the wind
And see the stars
To taste oceans
And deserts
And prairies
And call them home
It has known us
Our footprints have fallen upon it
Our tears have etched through its dust on our cheek
It has cradled us in sleep
But there is splendor in the morn
To rise anew and step into it
To inhale the grasses
Still damp with night
Of hay fresh baled
The very earth rendered open
Her soul laid bare
The bosom of life
We stand-to on the cusp of night
An August glow warms our face
Hazy memories dance upon the horizon
Of far away and long ago
Fleeting
Slipping from our grasp
We were there
In but a blink of an eye ago
Alas,
The world turned
And took us with it
---Rick Malo©2023---
The eastern Texas Panhandle was wracked with severe storms early on the morning of May 3rd, 2023, as a westbound BNSF freight rolls across the fill near Glazier.
Morning in Hemphill County, Texas.
Just after sunrise on a summer Saturday morning, an eastbound hotshot rolls fast across the grasslands of Hemphill County. In the distance, through the morning haze is the escarpment of the Llano Estacado rising 600 feet above the plains of the eastern Panhandle.
A dusk in Texas.
There's but a few yards of Lone Star real estate left for our eastbound hotshot to traverse before crossing into the Oklahoma Territory on a summer evening near Higgins, Texas.
In the hot pre-dawn hours of an August morning, a big GE dpu slips past the intermediates at milepost 518 at Cuyler, Texas as an empty unit grain train heads back east.
6206 at Black, Texas on a hot evening in August 2020.
With the siding in tiny Glazier, Texas a convenient place for westbound containers to wait out the supply chain crisis at backlogged West Coast ports, a fast eastbound hotshot slams past on the main just as the sun rises over the sagebrush of the Texas Panhandle on the morning of May 31st, 2022.
The setting sun casts fire on the mesa somewhere west of Belen, New Mexico as a pair of GEs roll east with autoracks on the drawbar. February 10th, 2021.
"October Morn."
A fast hotshot rolls westbound through Tolar, New Mexico on the morning of October 4th, 2022.
I'll paraphrase the words of my friend Jeff Ford, native Texas Panhandler and BNSF engineer:
"In the winter, half the dirt in Amarillo picks up and moves to Lubbock. In the summer, it goes back home to Amarillo."
We're just east of Panhandle, Texas at 3:14 pm on Sunday, May 29th, 2022 and the eastbound local out of Amarillo with three SD40-2s surrounding a lone SD70MAC is cause enough for us to brave southwest winds of 40mph gusting up to 60.
Catching rays at Tolar.
A fast westbound hotshot slips past the setting sun at Tolar, New Mexico on October 10th, 2022.
Evening thunderstorms and westbound containers at Tolar, New Mexico.
Set against a New Mexican sky hazy with smoke from the wildfires near Las Vegas, C44-9W 4193 and a sister roll westbound containers down grade off the Llano Estacado near Tolar on the afternoon of May 15th, 2022.
Twilight meet at Encino.
Eastbound autoracks dim their headlights for westbound containers out on the double-track main of the BNSF Transcon across the grasslands of New Mexico on the evening of October 4th, 2022.
Westbound at sunset.
Tolar, New Mexico.
"Ominosity."
Westbound near Encino, New Mexico. 4:07pm, October 4th, 2022.
6603 West. Transcon. Milepost 695.6. Tolar, New Mexico. 6:38 am, October 4th, 2022.
With westbound hotshot merchandise on the drawbar, five of GE's finest round the curve and lead the charge upgrade after crossing the Pecos River at Fort Sumner, New Mexico late on the afternoon of May 15th, 2022.
With a crewless intermodal train waiting in the siding for the backlog to clear at West Coast ports, the rising sun and swaying sand sage greet an eastbound train as it rolls fast through tiny Glazier, Texas.
Three GE motors roll a solid eastbound block of covered hoppers fast across the Llano Estacado west of Melrose, New Mexico on the afternoon of August 3rd, 2022.
A 70mph brick in the wall at Black, Texas.
Summer afternoon lights and shadows on the Transcon at Tolar, New Mexico.
