He is but a memory.
The winds have washed away the last traces of his passing: The smoke that once piled high on the upgrade, the quick four-barreled cadence clouding the perfect Texas sky with a plume of magnificence as 300 pounds of steam pressure and perfectly timed valves brought a legend into town on the well-oiled motion of reciprocating rods and 68-inch drivers.
Gone too are the masses; those students of the rail who drovered into town on a caravan of the faithful and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with those of perhaps a lesser interest in such particulars, but no less in their realization of the historical significance of the moment.
And as that soulful moan of a steam whistle rolled across the landscape and echoed off the front porches and aged storefronts for the first time in many years, its serenade struck a chord deep within the hearts of young and old alike and provided them with a memory that will surely last a lifetime.
But now the quiet has returned and the breezes are innocent of any trace of No.5 fuel oil, and the day in the sun is rapidly falling towards memory as an evening cloudbank gathers to put the day to rest.
In the deepening twilight a lone camera-armed straggler scrounges for a morsel, a pittance perhaps, roaming through the trackside grasses seemingly in denial and wandering in his unwillingness to accept the death of the day and the passage of grand things to memory. His is an exercise in futility until the dark westward absolute sentinel silently switches to red.
And in the last light at La Coste, he smiles.
After all, there’s still a railroad to run.
Rick Malo©2019
It’s 6:30 pm on Monday, November 4th, 2019 and the post-Big Boy euphoria is fading as an eastbound Continuous Welded Rail train rolls upgrade on Union Pacific’s Sunset Route mainline at La Coste, Texas.