Not long after I joined the Association of American Railroads’ Research & Test Department, I decided that I needed to have an official railroad watch. My wife bought me a beautiful old Hamilton 992 with the Pioneer Zephyr engraved on the back of the case to celebrate my new job. But I only had one suit with vest pockets so I couldn’t wear it to work very often. Many of the railroad people I had met wore a Bulova Accutron or a Seiko railroad approved wristwatch and, well, I wanted to have one too. So, during lunch breaks I visited some jewelry stores in downtown Washington, DC, and one day found one that had a Seiko on sale. I got my watch and was quite proud of it too.
In 1968, Robert McMillan left the Chicago & Western Indiana. The new owners of the C&WI wanted to demolish the 47th Street Roundhouse due to the building falling into disrepair, so with no warning, on February 27, 1969, Dick Jensen received a notice that he had 30 days to vacate the property. Negotiations with the C&WI extended the deadline to June 1. Panicking, the Midwest Steam Railfan’s Association quickly removed everything they could from the roundhouse. Lots of the little things were loaded into Dick’s bread delivery truck and stored at his home in Forest Park, Illinois.
With no place to relocate the two disassembled CB&Q locomotives to, Dick and his crew desperately searched for a new storage site, even if it was temporary. At one point, there were ongoing discussions of bringing the 4963 and 5632 to the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Illinois, but for reasons unknown, the plan never materialized, and the two engines remained in the roundhouse. (At the time, the 5629 was being stored in Detroit for excursion use there and besides some spare parts that Dick had kept in the roundhouse, it was uninvolved with this.)
When you live up on a hill above the river and the city stretches out below, there’s a few sounds you get used to, like auto noise from the freeway, the scream of late night motorcycle races, planes, helicopters, trains and on Sunday mornings, the sound of church bells. There are at least half a dozen churches within hearing distance and all ring their bells on the sabbath day. Easter in 2020, of course, was very different what with most of them closed due to “the Covid” as it is known around here. No bells were heard, and an eerie silence pervaded.
Larry McMurtry, the American author who wrote so eloquently about the changing West, died on March 25, 2021, at the age of eighty-four. He is perhaps best known for the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove, but he published both fiction and non-fiction over a long and prolific career. From his first novel, Horseman Pass By, here is a beautiful and evocative description of a warm evening on a Texas ranch, sitting on the porch watching the train go by as the day fades.
“Granddad was an old man then, and he worked hard days. By eight or eight-fifteen he was tired of sitting up. Around that time the nightly Zephyr flew by, blowing its loud whistle to warn the station men in Thalia. The noise cut across the dark prairie like the whistling train itself. I could see the hundred lighted windows of the passenger cars, and I wondered where in the world the people behind them were going night after night. To me it was exciting to think about a train. But the Zephyr blowing by seemed to make Granddad tireder; it seemed to make him sad. He told me one time that it reminded him of nights on roundup, long years ago. On quiet nights he and the other cowboys would sit around the fires, telling stories or drawing brands in the dirt. Some nights they would camp close to a railroad track, and a train would go by and blow its whistle at the fires. Sometimes it scared the cattle, and sometimes it didn’t, but it always took the spirit out of the cowboys’ talk; made them lonesomer than they could say. It made them think about womenfolk and fun and city lights till they could barely stand it. And long years after, when the last train would go by, Granddad got restless. He would stretch, and push his old rope-bottom chair up against the house. ‘Train’s gone, son,’ he said to me. ‘It’s bedtime.‘”
Twilight is fading to night, but the familiar dance of picking up and setting out cars continues at Ruleton, Kansas, on the Kyle Railroad. June 5, 2020.
Beyond the big-city bubble of Denver, where people wear masks to walk their dogs, the rural plains seem nonplussed by this new COVID-19 reality. Stopping for gas during a road trip through Kansas in June, I ran through a mental checklist of safety precautions as if refueling a spaceship, and in a way, I was. My Honda capsule allowed me to travel through the landscape, remaining socially distant, as those around me carried on with little notice.
While I was traveling, Amtrak announced it would reduce long-distance route service from a daily schedule to every other day to cut costs during the pandemic—a serious reduction for places with already limited options. Most passenger trains cross the plains nocturnally, quietly witnessed by only the train crew, the hardy passenger, and the occasional insomniac.
