“We had endless etcetera in railroading.”---David P. Morgan.
The trains have rumbled through my soul since the Table of Contents---
And, to paraphrase the esteemed DPM, haven't left yet.
It was for me to come of age when the world was 20 years removed of mechanical stokers and eccentric cranks and 60% cut-off, a turning point when many issued the thought that there was no longer drama on the high iron worth their efforts.
Steam was dead.
They stowed their gear, or found other things to point it at.
A portion of the “etcetera” that Morgan spoke of had suddenly become a footnote in the history books, and the source of “Ooooos” and “Ahhhhhs” at the Thursday evening railroad club slide shows.
And when there was no longer Alco smoke to rumble up from a 251 and roil through a turbostack, bending to the north wind as it blackens the hazy sky, or 567s and 645s and flared radiators and see-through Tunnel Motors, many of the remaining faithful were faithful no longer, and quit attending the trackside mass at their former place of worship.
But on this day, there is a displeasure voiced in the cold and wicked winds that rage over the Davis Mountains.
They gathered far to the north, sweeping fine red dust off the barren cotton fields of the South Plains, adding a bit of alkali from the Chihuahuan Desert as they roared south, spilling over the jagged mountains and ravaging dust from the floor of the Marfa Plateau---
A 50-mph gale to suddenly drop the temperature of a pleasant April day by 30 degrees in mere minutes, and buffet the flanks of eastbound tonnage, the shimmering essence of laboring GEs flowing out across One-Oh-One Flat as ripples of heat-induced air scorch the horizon.
An eerie howl urges a vicious chill up the spine, a wicked and undefinable melding of traction motors and blowers and screaming turbochargers set to a throbbing four-stroke rhythm; a Munch-ian affair of mechanical origin that has the back of the neck bristling as diesel beasts claw on their hands and knees, tonnage on the drawbar following 17,600 horses reluctantly around the curves and up the Paisano grade.
No drama, I beg?
It is early of a pristine April morn as the sun broaches the horizon to the rumble and quake of 64 cylinders screaming at the tops of their manifolds through four turbostacks into a cloudless West Texas sky, begging pardon from nobody as they dig into the cwr with a total of 730,000 pounds of starting tractive effort. After a crew change a mile and three-quarters back at the Alpine depot, the head hog opened the throttle on UP 1982 and 3 GE cohorts, coaxing a heavy westbound manifest freight into motion from a dead stop at the very bottom of the 1-percent Paisano grade.
They belch little smoke, and no one alive today will confuse them with a DL600B or a big Century 630---
But DAMN!
What a sight!
What a sound!
Yet there are those to say there is no drama---
No heart---
No soul to them---
Perhaps no style.
Each to his own.
But here, as they grind upgrade into an extinct caldera called Paisano, no one can say that they ain’t got guts.
That would border on blasphemy.
---RAM
Rick Malo©2025
