"Little old battered, telegraph stations under the eternal frown of dark
peaks, with Moguls stamping solemnly on the grade. Headlights along the
glittering ribbon of steel, crowded closed under the bluffs, with river
smells heavy in the night".
"Restless lights and ceaseless turmoil of great terminal yards. Lonely
tricks at the tag end of the night, when the stars died quietyly and the
gallant challenge of a hotshot was flung across the high prairies to salute
the dawn".
This from DESERT JOB originally published RAILROAD MAGAZINE 1945 and
reprinted in RAILROAD February 1960
How's this: "Indian Summer had come to the prairies, and a tranquil hush was
on that bright land. River smells floated up through the trees. The air was
like fragile silk".
Or this: "The low sun thrust bars of hard light into the long room. A dozen
telegraph instruments chanted a frantic cadence. Preoccupied operators
sprawled before typewriters, swiftly punching out messages with indolent
indifference. The trick dispatcher brooded over his train sheet at his
narrow table. Train and enginemen of a freight crew wrangled morbidly over
their report of a mishap that had befallen them on the run just completed.
The yardmaster shambled in to verify the makeup of an impending hotshot".
SMART BOOMER 1941
Or even this: "A mile of freight train rolled into the siding out of the
flare of low sun, drawing a dark line across the gray reaches, the ind end
lost back there in the shimmer of heat. The swing men slid down off the top,
while the conductor and a brakeman plodded forward doggedly from the caboose.
The engine crew and the head brakeman straggled back to the station from the
engine. They all sprawled on the floor of the little baggage room between
the wide doorways where the breeze, with a faint touch of coolness from the
Sea of Cortes, shifted fitfully."
"Their faces were streained and etched with fatigue. They had been fighting
their way through an opposing procession of first class schedules across the
district, hung up for dreary hours on passing tracks while the more urgent
traffic stormed by. Now the hog law had relieved them. They had been on
duty the legal limit of sixteen hours with;out rest, and they were to be
"patched"--other crews deadheaded out to take over their train and bring it
in."
The crews didn't have regularly assigned cabooses. They couldn't do any
cooking enroute, and in this empty land there were no restaurants of lunch
stands along the way. They had been able to eat only once during the long
hours they had been on duty, and that had been from cans at a tiny desert
grocery store."
The men lay on the wooden floor inert and apathetic until Number 2 flung in
out of the solitude. The passenger train paused to unload their relief crews
and to pick up these "dead" ones. They got up from the floor reluctantly,
all but the young fireman, who slept literally like a log. The engineer
stooped and stood the ashcat to his feet. The boy fought off sleep just long
enough to stumble aboard the passenger train"
Continued in Section Section
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