if i were a painter one of the first things i would paint would be one or another of the great railroad yards that abound in every city, those in new york and chicago being as interesting as any. only i fear that my brush would never rest with one portrait. there would be pictures of it in sunshine and cloud, in rain and snow, in light and dark, and when heat caused the rails and the cars to bake and shimmer, and the bitter cold the mixture of smoke and steam to ascend in tall, graceful, rhythmic plumes that appear to be composed of superimposed circles and spirals of smoke and mist.
the variety of the cars. the variety of their contents. the long distances and differing climates and countries from which they have come—the canadian snows, the mexican uplands, florida, california, texas and maine. as a boy, in the different cities and towns in which our family dwelt, i was forever arrested by the spectacle of these great freight trains, yellow, white, red, blue, green, toiling through or dissipating themselves in some terminal maze of tracks. i was always interested to note how certain cars, having reached their destination, would be sidetracked and left, and then presently the consignee or his agent or expressman would appear and the car be opened. ice, potatoes, beef, furniture, machinery, boxed shipments of all kinds, would be taken out by some lone worker who, having69 come with a wagon, would back it up to the opened door and remove the contents. most interesting of all to me were the immense shipments of live stock, the pigs, sheep, steers, on their last fatal journey and looking so non-understandingly out upon the strange world in which they found themselves, and baa-ing or moo-ing or squealing in tones that gave evidence of the uncertainty, the distress and the wonder that was theirs.
for a time in chicago, between my eighteenth and nineteenth years, i was employed as a car-tracer in one of the great freight terminals of a railroad entering chicago, a huge, windy, forsaken realm far out on the great prairie west of the city and harboring literally a thousand or more cars. and into it and from it would move such long freight trains, heavy with snow occasionally, or drenched with rain, and presenting such a variety of things in cars: coal, iron, cattle, beef, which would here be separated and entangled with or disentangled from many others and then moved on again in the form of other long trains. the clanging engine bells, the puffing stacks, the arresting, colorful brakemen and trainmen in their caps, short, thick coats, dirty gloves, and with their indispensable lanterns over their arms. in december and january, when the days were short and the nights fell early, i found myself with long lists of car numbers, covering cars in transit and concerning which or their contents owners or shippers were no doubt anxious, hurrying here and there, now up and down long tracks, or under or between the somber cars that lined them, studying by the aid of my lantern the tags and car numbers, seeing if the original70 labels or addresses were still intact, whether the seals had remained unbroken, on what track the car was, and about where, and checking these various items on the slip given me, and, all being correct, writing o. k. across the face of it all. betimes i would find a consigned car already in place on some far sidetrack, the consignee having already been notified, and some lone worker with a wagon busily removing the contents. sometimes, being in doubt, i would demand to see the authorization, and then report. but except for occasional cars, that however accurately billed never seemed to appear, no other thing went wrong.
subsequent to that time i have always been interested by these great tangles. seeing them as in new york facing river banks where ships await their cargoes, or surrounded by the tall coal pockets and grain elevators of a crowded commercial section, i have often thought how typical of the shift and change of life they are, how peculiarly of this day and no other. imagine a roman, a greek, an egyptian or an assyrian being shown one of these immense freight yards with their confusing mass of cars, their engines, bells, spirals of smoke and steam, their interesting variety of color, form and movement. how impossible to explain to such an one the mechanism if not the meaning of it all. how impossible it would be for him to identify what he saw with anything that he knew. the mysterious engines, the tireless switching, the lights, the bells, the vehicles, the trainmen and officials. and as far as some future age that yet may be is concerned, all that one sees here or that relates to this form of transportation may even in the course of a71 few hundred years have vanished as completely as have the old caravanseries of the orient—rails, cars, engines, coal and smoke and steam, even the intricate processes by which present freight exchange is effected. and something entirely different may have come in its place, transportation by air, for instance, the very mechanism of flight and carriage directed by wireless from given centers.
the car yard
and yet, as far as life itself is concerned, its strife and change, how typical of it are these present great yards with their unending evidences of movement and change. these cars that come and go, how heavy now with freight, or import; how empty now of anything suggesting service or use even, standing like idle, unneeded persons upon some desolate track, while the thunder of life and exchange passes far to one side. and anon, as in life, each and every one of them finds itself in the very thick of life, thundering along iron rails from city to city, themselves, or rather their contents, eagerly awaited and welcomed and sought after, and again left, as before. and then the old cars, battered and sway-backed by time and the elements and long service, standing here and there unused and useless, their chassis bent and sometimes cracked by undue strain or rust, their sides bulging, their roofs and doors decayed and warped or broken, quite ready for that limbo of old cars, the junk yard rather than the repair shop.
and yet they have been so useful, have seen and done so much, been in such varied and interesting places—the cities, the towns, the country stations, the lone sidings where they have waited or rolled in sun and72 rain. here in this particular new york yard over which i am now brooding, upon a great viaduct which commands it all, is one old car, recently emptied of its load of grain, about which on this winter’s day a flock of colorful pigeons are rising and falling, odd companions for such a lumbering and cumbersome thing, yet so friendly to and companionable with it, some of them walking peacefully upon its roof, others picking up remaining grains within its open door, others on the snowy ground before it picking still other fallen grains, and not at all disturbed by the puffing engines elsewhere. it might as well be a great boat accompanied by a cloud of gulls. and that other car there, that dusty, yellow one, labeled central of georgia, yet from which now a great wagonful of christmas trees is being taken from georgia, or where? has it been to maine or labrador or the canadian north for these, and where will it go, from here, and how soon? leaning upon this great viaduct that crosses this maze of tracks and commands so many of them, a great and interesting spectacle, i am curious as to the history or the lives of these cars, each and every one, the character of the places and lives among which each and every one of them has passed its days. they appear so wooden, so lumpish, so inert and cumbersome and yet the places they have been, the things they have seen!
i am told by the physicists that each and every atom of all of this wealth of timber and steel before me is as alive as life; that it consists, each and every particle, of a central spicule of positive energy about which revolve at great speed lesser spicules of negative energy.73 and so these same continue to revolve until each particular atom, for some chemic or electronic reason, shall have been dissolved, when forthwith these spicules re-arrange themselves into new forms, to revolve as industriously and as unceasingly as before. springs the thought then: is anything inert, lacking in response, perception, mood? and if not, what may each of these individual cars with their wealth of experience and observation think of this life, their place in it, their journeys and their strange and equally restless and unknowing companion, man?
