7:02 pm
Friday
April 17th, 2026
Time heals all wounds.
And the landscape is no different.
For more than forty years, the Llano Estacado has sought to reclaim the weed-grown rights-of-way that once knew the weight of Prairie-types shuffling single-sheathed boxcars to the countless grain elevators that jut skyward from the dusty towns that dot the High Plains of Texas. Brand new Farmall tractors that rolled out of the Rock Island, Illinois factory and right onto a flatcar, rocked gently down the dirt track light iron to places like Idalou and Ralls and Wolfforth and Brownfield. Unloaded at the house track adjacent to the standard Santa Fe depot, they would soon furrow the sandy red soil, the proud and hopeful new owners praying for rain with each dusty pass across the forty acres.
Carrying the markers, a creaking wooden heavyweight combination car provided unairconditioned accommodations for the few souls who sought passage to such places as Levelland and Seagraves and Crosbyton.
Doodlebugs sputtered across the top of the Panhandle to Booker and Perryton.
When steam died, the stocky 1800-class 2-6-2s were cleaned out of the roundhouse stalls at Slaton and other places. The lucky ones received a shiny coat of black paint and a ride to a city park. The unfortunate stood in line and watched silently as work-a-day blue F-units and GP7s took over and carried on, usually every day but Sunday.
The scrapper would come soon enough, and the remaining Baldwins would become just memories.
Improved highways would take the passengers as well.
Though it is rumored that Santa Fe freight conductors carried ticket punches right up to the birth of Amtrak, passenger accommodations in the caboose were no longer available after May 1st, 1971.
Unable to sustain the red ink on the ledger, the railroads would give the grain to the trucks. The branchlines that could not be peddled off to an independent shortline operator were ripped up.
The fifty-odd mile Lamesa Branch went in 1984. They tore out the rails through O’Donnell and Tahoka and Wilson, stopping the carnage here at a dusty, non-descript county road crossing 5 miles south of the mainline at Slaton.
The winds of the Llano Estacado began the long, slow process of healing the scars. In some places, the farmers have chewed into the roadbed with their big green and yellow John Deeres, disc plows and other implements churning the soil, turning it, furrowing it, dropping cotton seed into it, there to germinate under a rain of paleowater drawn up by pumps from the Ogallala Aquifer.
Their efforts have not fooled the Landsat 7&8 satellites, nor the Copernicus Sentinel-2s.
The view from space still tells the story.
Part of the story is that a highway closely parallels the roadbed in most spots.
The once unprofitable branchline now puts bread and butter on a trucker’s table---
Bread perhaps baked with wheat grown locally, and butter churned from milk that a trucker loaded into a 6,000-gallon stainless-steel food-grade tanker at a family farm in Dawson County and carried off to Gandy’s Dairy in Lubbock.
*
We came here with intention.
Yet, perhaps the ghost of Charles Clegg arranged the whole thing. His Kodak Medalist image of the end-of-track at Jaroso, Colorado rolls through a consciousness, sometimes on a maddening replay, stroking an addictive personality into seeking out a modern version of it.
Why is it that the simplest images speak into our very soul?
We’re an hour away from an April sunset over the South Plains. The westerly breeze is moderate, the temperature pleasant. The sun is warm on exposed arms, and shirttails flap gently.
Random clouds block the sun here and there, casting diagonal shadows across the sky. The brilliant light rakes sharply over the crossties.
Click.
Then the rumble---
Click.
The whine of big tires on asphalt---
Click.
A Peterbilt 379 pulling an aluminum end-dump grain trailer rolls through the frame---
Click.
A right foot stroking the fur on a big CAT motor and making her purr---
Click.
1800-foot-pounds of torque turning the splines on an 18-speed transmission---
Click.
I lower the camera and listen to his tires fade off into the evening---
And die gently on the wind.
The sound that raptured me as a young boy one summer night in South Texas so very long ago is still, to this day, a strong intoxicant.
It is the sound of wanderlust finding the right chord to strum in a soul.
As Morgan once said about the narrow gauge, so it is with trucking---
It enters your blood and will not out.
I’m fortunate to live that dream, spending over three million miles caressing the throttles of Peterbilts and all the others.
I came here with intentions---
And got a little extra.
I couldn’t have done this better if I had tried.
Thanks, Charles, for the serendipity of it all.
---RAM
Rick Malo©2026
Thank you!