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I perceive old railroad grades to be historical artifacts that help me feel or visualize the long gone era where they operated.  I think of the beehive of activity during the original grading and track laying and all the trains that puffed and clanked over them day and night, in all the seasons, as they outlasted the memories of generations of the people who worked them.  How many stories could those silent cuts and fills tell?The old roadbeds do seem to endure relatively long in the west where population is sparser and there is little need to reclaim the land.  In the agricultural country of the Midwest, many railroad grades are gone without a trace.  Underground though, the artifacts are still there.  Railroad grades are littered with old iron; spikes, angle bars, track bolts, nuts, brake shoes, journal box lids, pieces of rail, brake beam hangers, brake rods and pins, couplers, coupler links and pins, draft gear parts, cast iron washers, pieces of firebox grates, etc.  Some still lie visible on the surface after a century or more.  Some of these generic parts from the 1800s can be quite different from their counterparts from the more recent era.  Nineteenth century journal box lids, for example, can be solid cast iron with the manufacturer's name or logo cast into the surface.  Many were not hinged, but rather, dropped into a tapered opening like a wedge.Occasionally, one finds evidence of a wreck as a particularly dense profusion of iron parts, sometimes right on the surface or sticking out of the ground.  It is possible for these wreck sites to hold any fragment or part imaginable from rolling stock, locomotives, or track-work.  Never were all the pieces picked up when a wreck was cleared.  Out west, there are wrecks where rolling stock was simply left where it landed, and lies there today.
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