The High Gravity of Heavy Rail

The coldest morning yet to dawn on North Texas this season brings temperatures in the upper 20s. The cold snap finds me on the highway, at the wheel of a car that signals its displeasure with pops and groans and indignant little shudders,  headed up towards southern Oklahoma.This true cold is somewhat late in coming, but this year, it has been heralded by a particularly brilliant set of fall colors, one that approaches the palate typical to Eastern states. There are flaming oranges and yellows, plum-colored reds and murky purples. Were I not on a schedule I would be frequently tempted off the highway, waylaid with camera in hand at rural stretches that have turned uncharacteristically scenic.

There are many spots that catch my eye. If I-35 is a vein of transportation, then the BNSF is an artery. The tracks hug the path of the highway, weaving to the east and south of it like a double helix but never straying too far beyond the line of sight, and the trains run frequently and steadily, untouched by the chill. This particular stretch of track sees heavy traffic between Dallas/Fort Worth, the greater Oklahoma City area,  and many points to the north and south of both metroplexes. Intermodal stack trains form a majority of the cargo. Still more traffic moves on the the Union Pacific’s main line about ten mils to the east. Their route follows State Highway 77, the primary north-to-south route before Eisenhower’s highways.

This arrangement--tracks and pavement sharing the same corridor--is hardly unique. All of the major highways spoking out of Dallas are partnered with iron routes following the same path out of that great city and towards another. Take the Texas Eagle, and you get glimpses of I-20 all the way from  Marshall to Fort Worth. Drive down to Houston on I-45, and you can pace Union Pacific trains a good part of the way. I-30 encounters a number of different tracks as it heads east and more to the west, after it is downgraded to a state highway. The pattern holds outside the state of Texas-- to name a few, I-25 is buffered by UP and BNSF mainlines on either side in many parts of Colorado and Wyoming, I-40 and the rails slink around the same curves in northern New Mexico. Throughout the United States, the busiest and most heavily trafficked rail and road routes coincide.

How, and why, such a coexistence came about is deeply rooted in history. The railroads came to the United States at the same time that the young nation was establishing itself from the ground up. Had there been more of an interim between the coming of the railroads and the push to settle the West, the map of settlements might have been different: Denser, more concentrated along rivers, slower to spread. The growth of the railroads would have followed a more European pattern of connecting already established cities. The frontier and the railroads coming up together, though, meant that newer cities instead followed the path of the tracks. To settle anywhere else would be untenable. When paved roads and truck traffic arrived, it was only natural that they should form in the routes that the railroads had already eroded.
It is the pursuit of a story along these lines, how rails must come first and then development and economy and civilization follows, that is bringing me to Oklahoma in the first place.  It is an unerring principle that still holds true in the present. While departing the grounds I stumble upon a bonus: A pile of wrecked telegraph poles, some with the glass fruits still intact. I am permitted to pick through them and take what I please, as challenging as it is in temperatures that freeze the dexterity out of one’s hands. The site manager says he has been pestering the railroads to come and clean them up anyway. It’s a small favor to him if I leave with my arms full of Hemingray and Whitehall Tatum glass.

This pile of shattered glass and piled crossbars speaks to another close inter-industry relationship, this one between the railroads and telecommunications. The simple fact is that trains do not move with any efficiency or safety if their operators lack the ability to move information faster than the trains.

It was a fantastic stroke of luck that the first serviceable telegraph networks appeared within a few years of the first railroads being constructed. Without the ability to coordinate more than one train on the same track, to halt them when danger presented itself,  the power and speed latent inside of a locomotive would be wasted, stunted, truncated so severely as to render them little more effective than the pack animals they were intended to replace. Conversely, the establishment of continent-spanning telegraph lines and all of the cultural and social change that followed might have been significantly retarded without the opportunity to string them along the same corridors that were being carved out for train tracks.

Railroads and telecommunications were novelties on their own; it was only when paired together together that they were revolutionary. The symbiosis continued long after telephones, radios, and then the internet rendered the technology obsolete. Many railroad companies were early adopters of each of those technology: Anything that made trains move faster and safer translated into an improved bottom line.  Time and time again, no matter how the physical infrastructure of telecommunications evolves,  it has been convenient to place it along the railroad tracks. Compare a map of the railroad routes and a map of major internet cables, for instance, and their appearance will be almost indistinguishable.

Considered in this light, as the marrow of our nation’s skeleton, the railroads bring to mind one of those theoretical illustrations that shows the fabric of space and time curving under the weight of a dense star or other massive object. Railroad infrastructure might not compose a wide corridor, but its presence is solid enough, important enough, that everything else  roll towards the conduit it creates. The closer something else  is placed the tracks, the more vital it is.

The train traffic hasn’t reduced as I finish up and head back down across the border. It’s no wonder that trains of the past are regarded with so much nostalgia, and contemporary plans to grow our nation so often hinge on rail infrastructure. Nothing stands without its bones in place first, and we have an iron spine.