The sun is but a few minutes from its nightly intercourse with the West Texas horizon.
There is no rush hour on this Saturday evening. The industrial side of Midland is quiet, the doors at Sims Plastics and Midland Power Tools and Acme Brick won’t open again until 8am on Monday.
The scant traffic shares Front Street with a cold January wind that whips and snarls and brings ill will down from the north, kicking up enough dust to haze the otherwise flawless evening sky.
The crews rebuilding the intersection and grade crossing at Garfield Street have knocked off for the weekend and traded their high viz safety vests for ice cold Coronas and Negro Modelos down at Garely’s or El Taco Loco Birrieria, the orange plastic barrels and flashing signs and striped barricades hopefully preventing an errant motorist from performing any of the acts of stupidity that area motorists are notorious for.
In no particular hurry, an eastbound ambles into town on the old Texas & Pacific, its three units grinding away atop the 136-lb rail, a 710 hitched up to a couple of FDLs making for an odd tempo that would surely be out of tune with the local mariachis playing down at the Montecito.
Knuckled up behind them is a sizeable train of loads and empties; long black tank cars with red placards numbered UN1075 for liquified petroleum gas; short white tank cars with a rust colored band around the center section placarded UN1789 for hydrochloric acid; ratty, rusty, beat-up plug-door boxes of varying colors and heights and cube whose identity is confined only to the reporting marks that haven’t been obliterated by graffiti; equally varied covered hoppers whose gray paint is shabby-looking and heavily streaked with rust and road grime; several empty center-beam lumber flats heading back to the pine forests of East Texas for another load of finished 2x4s; banged-up old gondolas filled with scrap steel from the grinder over on the west end of Odessa; and a lone autorack bringing up the rear, its shiny galvanized side panels glinting brightly in the late afternoon sun as it rolls past, FRED on the last knuckle sending temperature and blood pressure up to the engineer in his SD70ACe.
Long gone are the gray-boilered Texas-types, whistle moaning over the parallel Bankhead Highway as the hogger pulled the cord for the grade crossings and shoved in the throttle to drift up to the water tank out at Fairground Road on the east end.
Long gone, too, are the 40-foot PS-1s on the drawbar jangling to a stop, their colorful flanks decorated with emblems and heralds and slogans of every road imaginable, unafraid to tell the world who they were and where they’re from, and unafraid to show pride in their undertakings to the kid waving from the backseat of an old Ford.
Today’s kids hardly look up from their I-Phones.
The sound of a 3-chime horn and 48 cylinders juicing-up a/c traction motors fades off to the east.
By the time they reach Chub siding, the winter wind will have vacated any remnant of their passing.
The sun hangs just above the west end of Front Street but a few minutes longer.
It is stingy with its warmth.
The wind that finds its way around a shirt collar and down the back of the neck says that January has other ideas.
Hands that once waved out the back window of an old Ford are now wrinkled and calloused, bent, riddled with arthritis, punctuated with a broken knuckle that never healed.
The face, though etched deep with life---
Knows no bitterness---
And still smiles at passing trains.
---RAM
Rick Malo©2026
Thank you!