Penny on the Tracks

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View at twilight in a departure yard at C & N.W. R.R. Proviso yard, Chicago, Illinois; brakeman is signaling with a red flare and the train is going by during exposure: photo by Jack Delano, December 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Train whistles in the night at the western margin of the sprawling meatpackers' metropolis of the Plains. O common child's lonesome midnight monody of imagined distances, grand mythic romance of spaces undivided and free. That's the mournful cry of the Four Hundred passing a level crossing on the run to Bensenville, or from the Proviso yard the annunciatory declaration of a long freight going over the Hump.

General view of one of the classification yards of Chicago and North Western Railroad, Chicago, Illinois: photo by Jack Delano, December 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Saturday mornings as soon as the boy is allowed on the North Western commuter alone, there begins his enthralled sojourning to the six great cathedrals, the major terminals, vast sheds of ingress and egress. The incoming locomotives breathing steam along the busy platform with wheel housings snow- and ice-encrusted, he could approach and touch the exotic grey sludge which bespoke the storms of Ohio and Michigan, Kansas and Nebraska. A tactility to inform the night visions of Burlington and Battle Creek, Ogden and Kenosha.

View in a departure yard at Chicago and North Western R.R. Proviso yards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by Jack Delano, December 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

The lyric, epic, tragic but never Arcadian American wilds....Between reality and dream lay the big sweeping corn country beyond Clinton, Iowa, a fat feed bin reaching all the way to Omaha where the squalid slaughter factories of the gimcrack emperors Cudahy, Hormel and Armour provided a steady flood of animal blood that engrossed and sustained the city of big shoulders -- heartland always a misnomer in that region which boasted appetite aplenty, horse sense, practicality, material rapacity and capacity beyond the world's guessing, vast muscle to lend the nation, production, consumption, everything, in fact, but sweetness and a gentle mind.

General view of a classification yard at Chicago and North Western R.R. Proviso yards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by Jack Delano, December 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

A boy's way of stamping self-conjured geographical heraldries into an object that could be kept as their talisman: to place a penny upon the rails, not far from home, and huddle in concealment in the wayside ditch until the train goes by in a frightening rush of noise and steam, headed west toward the switching yard at La Grange. And in the quiet wake, retrieve the iron-flattened void copper disc, a fresh-minted dream emblem, coin of the realm of the faraway, shiny tablet upon which to inscribe, with a sharp metal tool meant for bicycle repair, one's name.

Illinois Central R.R., freight cars in South Water Street Terminal, Chicago, Illinois: photo by Jack Delano, April 1943 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)