A little trip out west--ix

Let me explain.

That BNSF engine is pushing, not pulling, hundreds of empty cars--pushing. Way, way, way up front--you can't see it--a couple of Union Pacific engines are pulling this huge rig too.

Now look down the track. See those lights way down there? That's another UP engine pulling yet another couple hundred cars (I didn't count--seemed like closer to 200) every last one of them poured full of coal. I took that picture, as well as the next two--

8884 here is the engine behind the faraway lights in the picture above.

And this big bertha (two of them) is the one whose rear end shows up in that picture at the top of the page. Truth is, I stepped out of the car (you can see the road just on the other side of the tracks) and sat there for five minutes max. I stopped because I couldn't help notice the trains coming, fast and furious. every five minutes, it seemed--each eastern-bound monster lugging a mountain of coal, while the west returners were empty. Made me wonder how many cars were lined up at the coal fields because those trains just kept coming. And going. Leaving Wyoming full to the brim; returning like a string of tin cans. Made me wonder about just how big were the coalfields.

I'm in western Nebraska, following the Oregon Trail. Once upon a time, the trains did too, Union Pacific pounding in the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah. Once upon a time hundreds of Chinese workers laid track right here for a hundred thousand passenger cars with big fat steam locomotives out front. Like Big Ben here.

Right there in rural Nebraska, it's impossible not to think about the rugged 400,000 who'd made the danger-filled trek west in prairie schooners, and the Natives who watched them, then swore there would be no more. You can't help wondering what it must have been like for those who'd never seen a train before to suddenly witness the beast bellowing away in the garden. 

We're half a continent away from Concord, Mass, but I can't help thinking of Henry David Thoreau, who witnessed the iron horse stampede through the neighborhood of Walden Pond:

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion,—or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve,—with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light,—as if this travelling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. 

That's Thoreau, with his Harvard education and his literary ambitions, describing his overwhelmed senses in a chapter titled "Sounds"--while a train runs by on the brand new Fitchburg Railroad in the early 1850s.

In rural Nebraska, there I stood beside monster snakes criss-crossing the plains in places where you need only step out the car to see ruts from untold covered wagons. Crazy Horse and his warriors made life perfectly miserable for them. I can't help but wonder what he and his people thought of this "iron horse" bellowing smoke behind an awful song? When they saw this monster railroad violate their hunting grounds, they had to know something just as huge about their lives was coming to an end. 

Standing there beside the railroad on the Oregon Trail, it's hard to think this great American story as contrary as the Civil War, but it was: both were stupendous, even selfless efforts, daring deprivation and death. They were immense and bloody human undertakings that offered heroism and horror in sometimes equal portions. A half a million people in this country--1837 to 1869-- crossed the American wilderness in ox-drawn wagons risking death at the hands of what they considered "savages," not to mention the ravages of nature herself, for the dream of ease gold strikes promised.

And then the railroad.

After 1869, this very Union Pacific paved the way, ancestors of these very monster engines delivered more people on the way west, the pilgrimage countless times easier aboard that iron horse.

If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer’s fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort.

Okay, I've read too much Thoreau. 

Today--see above--what they carry is coal. More on that tomorrow.