If I were a painter one of the first things I would paint would be one or another of the great railroad yards that abound in every city, those in New York and Chicago being as interesting as any. Only I fear that my brush would never rest with one portrait. There would be pictures of it in sunshine and cloud, in rain and snow, in light and dark, and when heat caused the rails and the cars to bake and shimmer, and the bitter cold the mixture of smoke and steam to ascend in tall, graceful, rhythmic plumes that appear to be composed of superimposed circles and spirals of smoke and mist. The variety of the cars. The variety of their contents. The long distances and differing climates and countries from which they have come—the Canadian snows, the Mexican uplands, Florida, California, Texas and Maine. As a boy, in the different cities and towns in which our family dwelt, I was forever arrested by the spectacle of these great freight trains, yellow, white, red, blue, green, toiling through or dissipating themselves in some terminal maze of tracks. I was always interested to note how certain cars, having reached their destination, would be sidetracked and left, and then presently the consignee or his agent or expressman would appear and the car be opened. Ice, potatoes, beef, furniture, machinery, boxed shipments of all kinds, would be taken out by some lone worker who, having69 come with a wagon, would back it up to the opened door and remove the contents. Most interesting of all to me were the immense shipments of live stock, the pigs, sheep, steers, on their last fatal journey and looking so non-understandingly out upon the strange world in which they found themselves, and baa-ing or moo-ing or squealing in tones that gave evidence of the uncertainty, the distress and the wonder that was theirs.
For a time in Chicago, between my eighteenth and nineteenth years, I was employed as a car-tracer in one of the great freight terminals of a railroad entering Chicago, a huge, windy, forsaken realm far out on the great prairie west of the city and harboring literally a thousand or more cars. And into it and from it would move such long freight trains, heavy with snow occasionally, or drenched with rain, and presenting such a variety of things in cars: coal, iron, cattle, beef, which would here be separated and entangled with or disentangled from many others and then moved on again in the form of other long trains. The clanging engine bells, the puffing stacks, the arresting, colorful brakemen and trainmen in their caps, short, thick coats, dirty gloves, and with their indispensable lanterns over their arms. In December and January, when the days were short and the nights fell early, I found myself with long lists of car numbers, covering cars in transit and concerning which or their contents owners or shippers were no doubt anxious, hurrying here and there, now up and down long tracks, or under or between the somber cars that lined them, studying by the aid of my lantern the tags and car numbers, seeing if the original70 labels or addresses were still intact, whether the seals had remained unbroken, on what track the car was, and about where, and checking these various items on the slip given me, and, all being correct, writing O. K. across the face of it all. Betimes I would find a consigned car already in place on some far sidetrack, the consignee having already been notified, and some lone worker with a wagon busily removing the contents. Sometimes, being in doubt, I would demand to see the authorization, and then report. But except for occasional cars, that however accurately billed never seemed to appear, no other thing went wrong.
Subsequent to that time I have always been interested by these great tangles. Seeing them as in New York facing river banks where ships await their cargoes, or surrounded by the tall coal pockets and grain elevators of a crowded commercial section, I have often thought how typical of the shift and change of life they are, how peculiarly of this day and no other. Imagine a Roman, a Greek, an Egyptian or an Assyrian being shown one of these immense freight yards with their confusing mass of cars, their engines, bells, spirals of smoke and steam, their interesting variety of color, form and movement. How impossible to explain to............