A hundred Warbonnets, put out to pasture

Two or three seconds of confusion is all it takes: I miss the exit for I-35, and end up heading through the center of Oklahoma City instead of to the north-east, where I am expected at the Oklahoma Railway Museum. Past the center of the city, the highway arcs upwards to cross over a decently sized rail yard, crowded from end to end with equipment. I catch the unmistakable flare of a a locomotive painted in the Warbonnet scheme, then another, then I see a dozen or more of them. They are strewn throughout the yard, mixed in with motive power painted orange and black and the occasional executive green. This yard is reversed:locomotives outnumber pieces of rolling stock a hundred to one. Eventually I come to a sober realization: This is Nowers Yard, and what appeared to be freight trains at first glance is actually hundreds of cold locomotives forced into storage by the flagging energy industry.    

This is one of those wrong turns that seems strangely right.

I pull off the highway at the next opportunity and find a street that parallels the edge of Nowers Yard. Blocks of warehouses keep most of the yard blocked from sight, but glimpses of its contents are visible from in between the buildings. Eventually, a  relatively decent view of the rail yard opens up. There are hundreds of locomotives here, shoved knuckle to knuckle to make use of every foot of space. I am surprised by how many of them  where red and silver, green and white, or heralds of other fallen flags. There must be a hundred or more Warbonnets here, more than I would have guessed to still be in service in the entire BNSF network.

I spend about a quarter of an hour studying these engines from an adjacent parking lot.  I tense my muscles, bracing for the blaring horns and their echoes off of the highway overpasses,  expect to feel small earthquakes rumbling through the ground under my feet.  The sheer volume of  horsepower latent in these machines defies contemplation. At the very least I hope to hear the rails groan and pop under their weight.  The engines’ repose is never broken, though, and Nowers Yard remains hauntingly still. I am accustomed to thinking of transportation as a fundamental aspect of our society, and it is jarring to realize that there are forces strong enough to interrupt them. I can recall feeling the same way a few months ago when a spate of tornadoes flattened neighborhoods east of Dallas, and three years before that when I found myself in the midst of the still-smoldering ruins of the exploded factory in West, Texas.

Part of me wonders if it is insensitive to compare economic troubles to events that claimed a high toll in human life, but there is no denying that these locomotives allude to a staggering human tragedy. The metrics come tumbling through my mind. Each of these locomotives represents engineers and conductors laid off in roughly equal numbers, the suffering of families and communities that are wanting for income. They attest to the evaporation of hundreds of thousands tons of commodities, and all the revenue and jobs that have disappeared as those goods are not ordered, delivered, and produced. These locomotives are the most visceral manifestation of headlines about pain in the energy industry  that one can encounter without actually visiting boarded up  mine shafts or closed-down refineries. For all their hard lines and unyielding steel, they put a humane face to an economic downturn. The worst part of the encounter is knowing is that the state of Nowers Yard is not an anomaly. All of the Class I railroads operating in the United States have endured similar cutbacks, and there are yards and sidings congested with unused equipment spread through the entire country.  

I have little more time or will to linger in Nowers Yard.  I snap a few more pictures from the side of the road, then reorient myself towards the Museum and  then proceed on my way, but the silent locomotives remain in the back of my mind.  They seem to be in real danger of  becoming permanently entrenched here even if economic conditions change from the better, of sitting until their paint forgets its brightness and fades to bone-white, of being forgotten forever.  I want to demand answers for why these locomotives have been sidelined here, the same way that the public demands the causes of any other tragedy be dissected and diagnosed, but what happened here is more complex than any act of God or gross negligence.   To restore motion here isn't just a matter of overcoming lost inertia, it is a matter of grappling with problems arising from the very core of our economic and political sector. It is difficult to raise and sustain a demand that a problem be solved, that we simply make these trains run, when the factors that forced them to halt are dispersed through so many different industries. 

It’s a cold comfort that someday hindsight will let us point to the spot where the economy began to trend back upwards, when all the horsepower parked here was called back into service. They’ll identify whether these idled locomotives were the culmination of troubles in the railroad industry, or were a warning sign that the economy is poised to take a harsher bruising. A change in the tide cannot be noticed when one is flailing at sea. Someday the economy will turn and the railroads will reinvent themselves to reflect the change, they always do, but for now, we are left to endure the stillness.