You’ve come a long way from July; a long way from a Requiem for Twilight and summer sweat-dampened shirttails flapping at your back on the breath of still-hot central Texas cotton field sundown, the drone of diesel motors drowning out the concert of crickets mingling among the bolls.
You’re a long way too from the rich black land soils; the oaks and hackberries and the junipers have many miles ago faded from the rear view mirror and now you stand before the great transition, where the plains morph almost unnoticed into the desert and the dry air seldom stops moving.
As it is with the land, so it is with the sky as day gradually transitions into the late-autumn night. There is a certain grandeur in the western Texas evening, and the engineer has raised his sun visor so that he might enjoy the view as well. He’s got green ahead on the intermediate, CWR under his feet and a double-stack rocket on rails at his back as he slams towards sundown at Stanton.
We may indeed have come a long way from that hot July evening, but not from trains heading off into the night.
They just run a little faster out here.
One can see why.
Rick Malo©2019
It’s 6:03 pm on December 6th, 2019 and we’re 20 miles east of Midland as a fast westbound Union Pacific stack train blasts through Stanton, Texas on the old T&P mainline.