A Trip on the Santa Fe

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Passing a section house along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, Encino vicinity, New Mexico, March 1943

The heavy industries that built and shaped our lives are dying
The sights and sounds now but memories of their once throbbing rituals
That echo and reflect their death throes
In retrospect
A pall of absence hangs over things
Yet time continues to move forward
Along the rusted tracks and corroded rails
Around blind corners
Through a labyrinth of empty corridors

We've perhaps been here
We will never be back
The tracks go on unscrolling
And we go on following the tracks
These endless parallels endlessly unravelling

A flagman
A pale glimmering signal light
Against the deep blue of the sky
Space drifts
We move forward as a scroll is unscrolled
There is no turning back
The pale glimmering of a signal
A level crossing
The stark figure of a man
He holds up one arm
As if beckoning
We pass another level crossing
Time floats
We follow the tracks
Distance
Iron rusting under snow
Absence
Smoke
The tracks continue on toward infinity
And a vanishing point
Debris of a past cluttered with activity and use

Oblique lines do bend and may greet but parallels though infinite may never meet
Rust covers everything an iron blight of time oxidizing
The past
We won't be back this way again soon
We were never really here so how can it be we're leaving
The blight of time an irony corroding what we've left behind

Time that is the ghostly material medium in which we think and act
Compelled onward yet never knowing where we're going
Turned aside, derailed, misled, diverted, confused, disoriented, finally lost
Time continues to grind on as long as we keep breathing

The world of time through which we travel which we have made and which has made us
Has only one direction
Forward
And one speed
This speed
And one destination

Santa Fe Railroad freight train about to leave for the West Coast, Corwith yard, Chicago, Illinois, March 1943

Re-tiring a locomotive drive wheel, Santa Fe Railroad shops, Shopton, Iowa: the tire is heated by means of gas until it can be slipped over the wheel; contraction will hold it firmly in shape, March 1943

Servicing engines at coal and sand chutes at Argentine Yard, Santa Fe Railroad, Kansas City, Kansas, March 1943

Santa Fe Railroad locomotive shops, Topeka, Kansas, March 1943

Yardmaster in Santa Fe Railroad yards, Amarillo, Texas, March 1943

Grain elevators along the route of Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, Amarillo, Texas, March 1943

A completely overhauled engine on the transfer table at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad locomotive shops, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 1943

Santa Fe Railroad train near Melrose, New Mexico, March 1943

Santa Fe Railroad near Melrose, New Mexico, March 1943

Flagman standing at a distance behind a Santa Fe westbound freight train during a stop, Bagdad, California, March 1943

Mojave Desert country, crossed by the Santa Fe Railroad, Cadiz, California

Activity in Santa Fe Railroad yard, Los Angeles, California: all switch lights, head lights and lamps have been shaded from above in accordance with blackout regulations; the heavy light streaks are caused by paths of locomotive headlights and the thin lines by lamps of switchmen working in the yards, March 1943

Folks around these parts get the time of day
From the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe
-- Johnny Mercer, 1944

Photos by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)