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  As things often go, 2982 had eventually been reassigned to a far-off district. Man and machine were put out of touch. Now though, was a time of long overdue reunion. Eleven years later, Joe happily rounded the last corner, turning onto the ready-track and his awaiting, Baby.

  Finally seeing it, the man came up short. His smile dimmed and his pace slowed. Even from a distance, it was obvious that the time since had been tough. Like him, its glory days were now behind. And like Joe, 2982 was tired.

  The neglected soot of a thousand fires hung as a filthy shawl across the steamer’s broad, sun-blistered back. It was streaked in a gritty, white mantle of leaked traction sand and water treatment salts that ringed it like streams of long dried sweat.

  A shiny ooze of fresh oil leaks girdled its cylinder packings. Assorted greases and road grime clung low in belly-wide, disrespectful clumps. The engine’s mighty driving wheels were grooved with the wear of too many hard miles and worse, rusty firebox bolts gave witness to life threatening, water jacket seepage.

  For the second time today, Joe steeled himself to blunt reality. Here was just another pitiful sign of changing times - a once, grand dame of the high iron spending her twilight service downgraded from time-critical freight to his kind of sleepwalking existence. The man’s frail moment of joy withered. His hopeful reunion became more a meeting of new age orphans.

  Yet, even in Baby’s neglected state, Joe found a lingering touch of solace. His weather-beaten beauty still commanded the handsome lines of its thoroughbred origins. And the machine itself, seemed unaffected by that same neglect, instead, almost wearing it proudly, as though a hard-earned badge of honor. Even at this late point in its career, the old Berk appeared only concerned with making its next run.

  The engine number boards gave an impression of coming erect at Joe’s approach. Like ears gone on full alert, they keened to the familiar steps of a long absent man who had first held its reins, remembering well that his touch was a gentle one.

  Arrived beside, Joe set a callused hand to the haggard iron horse. He spoke, stroking it with a favored caress.

  “Hello, old girl.”

  His hand lingered for a moment. Then, it was time for business. Joe slid on a pair of heavy leather, gauntlet work gloves and began a normal, predeparture, walk-around.

  The engineer’s veteran eyes scanned and graded his machine’s interlocked array of drive rods, valve gear, levers, pumps, and assorted linkages. He inspected all the wheel castings with their sweated steel tires for damage. No bolt, bar, bushing, or brace escaped him. A quick listen to the whisper of barely lifting safety valves high above satisfied the man.

  Joe next hoisted himself into the engine cab. Securing his battered lunch pail low, beside his hard, right hand seat, he scouted the cabalistic maze of unlabeled hand valves, levers, and lanyards ranged about.

  The locomotive’s nerve center ranged from floor to ceiling. It was a realm of black-bag controls, understood solely by an esoteric fraternity, who, only through an extensive and demanding apprenticeship, had earned the right to handle such beasts. To Joe Graczyk, though, this spot was comfortable as an old shoe.

  The engineer rapped his finger against a steam pressure gauge and verified its dictated psi rating. He next opened the valves of twin sight glasses to confirm the machine’s water level. Existing droplets told Joe that his fireman had already checked their accuracy. But, as part of normal procedure, Joe repeated the test, confirming things with the safety-dictated second opinion.

  He stomped the engine’s firebox floor treadle and swung wide its butterfly doors. A dead-level blaze shimmered within. It had a good heel tucked in the back corners and was formed in a textbook perfect and even burning, horseshoe pattern. Possessing an eye capable of separating such a 2000-degree inferno into its individual components of air, fuel, and fire, Joe again, was satisfied.

  The sweet, low sulfur coal from the road’s own downstate mines was burning bright. Just enough blower was dialed in, to keep sapphire-blue highlights skittering across the iridescent pyre, and on their way through the 80-foot-long maze of fire tubes and superheaters. Leisurely exiting its distant stack, the resting locomotive’s exhaust was the perfect, graphite shade of a Ringelmann smoke grading chart.

  Even considering the Berk’s long deferred general maintenance, Sunday’s roundhouse boys had done their usual, fine, on-the-spot prep work. The quarter-time pulse of its compound air pumps was a confident heartbeat as Joe awaited his fireman, Vinton Cougler.

  Vint was a transplanted downstate boy, the youngest and only non-Slavic member of Joe’s otherwise totally East European-bred crew. Carrying an honorary nickname of, Vint-ski by his associates, he was a hard worker and had become a valued crewman. But, he would shortly be ending his stint as a road engine trainee. As soon as a mainline job opened somewhere, the young man would be moving on, to a reward of better things, as he should. Joe would miss him, wondering who might be his replacement, while knowing surely, who would not.

  Rail lean Vint now returned from a check of their tender’s coal and water stores. He tossed the engine’s wheel chock chains onto the rear floor apron, agilely following.

  “Mornin’ Joebie!”

  Joe removed the throttle’s lock pin, looking over.

  “All set, Vintski?”

  The fireman affirmed his fuel feed controls and offered a raised thumb.

  “Yes sir! Let ‘er rip!”

  Joe first checked for any trackside pedestrians, then opened the engine’s blow down valve. A quick gush of scalding water sprayed from deep in its bowels and with it, any heat-stealing sludge that might’ve settled low in the boiler’s water jacket.

  Cylinder petcocks were next opened, venting its chilled valves and pistons to a bath of fresh, warming steam. Things were now set for movement.

  Joe turned on the engine bell and swept its brake handle aside. Adding a couple sharp whistle blasts, he announced his intended travel for the departure track and awaiting train. He nudged the reverse lever, slowly feeding throttle, while tickling the wheel sanders for additional starting traction.

  There was that familiar, brief moment of pause, while the laws of thermodynamics and physics sorted themselves out. Then, like an obedient pachyderm, the 800-ton engine leaned ahead. It gave a determined yawn of its stack, and began toward a line of freight cars and Joe’s remaining crew.

  Roman Spike Jackowniak stood beside a thrown yard switch, reversing the engine for its train. The barrel-chested head brakeman had their day’s flimsies tucked in his shirt pocket. They were work order copies, given over by the train’s conductor, Karol Pappy Cielczska, now situated in his distant caboose-office.

  Spike swept a practiced foot atop the engine’s low-hung stirrup and latched onto its grab irons. He remained there for a short ride to the first car in line, then hopped down from the slowing engine, staying clear as he motioned Joe backward.

  After a gentle linking of couplers, Spike hiked up his pants and adjusted the rectangular buckle of a much worn military belt looping them. He swung a broad arc of arm toward the engine tender and first car, indicating his hazardous intention of stepping between to connect their thick air hoses.

  Splinters of light flashed from the belt’s work scarred buckle as Spike moved about and Joe grinned in irony. It reinforced one of the few things he could yet count on in these frustrating times; that this business of railroading was an occupation which reduced everything to its simplest denominator. No vanity or posturing was to be found here. Even wartime relics could wind up simply being items put to practical use.

  In the case of Spike’s belt, it was an old, enemy uniform souvenir. Brought back by the man’s nephew after VE Day, its broad, formerly noble leather, was cracked and frayed and stained from work-a-day use. The large, distinctively stamped buckle and once-proud, Gott Mitt Uns slogan of a deposed warrior race was now simply a handy clasp for a lowly r
ailroader’s grimy work drawers. (And one worn disrespectfully askew to avoid pinching his ample peacetime girth.)

  Spike returned to the locomotive, again shifting the belt buckle aside to thrust his hefty frame inside the cab. He plopped heavily on the engine’s jump seat, snapping a nickel cigar in half with his large, square teeth. Starting his day’s first chaw, he handed Joe the work orders.

  “Mornin’ gents. Thirty-eight cars; thirteen and ninety-two tons. Regular set outs. All tied in, Joe.”

  Graczyk spoke a quick thanks in Polish.

  “Dziekuje.”

  “Prosze bardzo.” Replied Spike, in kind.

  Joe stuffed the orders in his coveralls and spun backwards, for a better look at the train’s rear brakeman, Zygmunt Kopczak. Ziggy stood there offering his distant signal for an air test, which Joe obeyed. He swung the cab lever to its full-service position, immediately ramping-up 2982’s compressors. A quick gush of wind raced out to plug any gaps in the brake line plumbing of Joe’s three-million-pound train.

  In a few minutes the pumps slowed, indicating full system pressure. Joe verified it at a steady 90 psi from his end and a release brakes signal from Ziggy concurred at the other.

  Again nursing the reverse lever, Joe now ran in his train’s slack. This action slightly bunched the cars, so when starting ahead, the locomotive would essentially move each one separately, minimizing the strain of getting under way.

  Joe gave the whistle rope another double-tug and gently fed his engine some throttle. A fleeing chorus of rumbling drawbars verified every set of locked car couplers trailing behind. Scrutinizing the boiler sight glass, he evenly applied more power. This worked to prevent any rearward surging of boiler water, which might lighten the drive wheels’ adhesion to their rails, causing the engine to stumble and tear fire-chilling holes in Vint’s dead-level blaze.

  The mission of a competent engine driver was to coax the best performance from any locomotive in his company’s stable without being a pounder, one of those indifferent operators who callously abused machines placed in their care. And Joe Graczyk ranked among the elite.

  He was blessed with an operator’s instinct for translating the drone of a working engine into a pulse of its component sounds. He could itemize and grade the furious high iron medley of hammering drive gear and thundering exhaust, never failing to get the best possible blend of both performance and economy from any iron horse placed in his trust.

  Such was the case again, today. Up to that moment Joe had his machine tiptoeing along at a proper, dead-slow, yard speed limit. But, with the departure track set and the signal board giving him a hearty green light, he began feeding his locomotive more power. The mighty Berkshire willingly complied, shouldering its many tons of freight without complaint.

  Clearing the crossover, Joe flicked his reins firmer yet. 2982 now sensed the open road and leaned eagerly into its harness. A rhythm of deep, super-heated snorts filled the air and had the proud driver humming a favored old tune in praise.

  Yes sir, that’s my baby. No sir, I don’t mean maybe.

  Joe Graczyk’s workday had begun.

  CHAPTER 3

  The 1950s world was ramping up and America was a land in transition. Its long running Industrial Age was slowly cresting. Its new Space Age, slowly being born.

  The formal postwar occupation of Japan was concluding, with a parting of old enemies turned into new friends. The first rumblings of something called rock-n-roll was stirring the airwaves and an amusement park of unheralded scope had recently opened in Southern California.

  Today, a loaf of bread cost fifteen cents, with gasoline pushing a quarter-dollar per gallon. Even so, a recent market survey predicted that with the newly raised U.S. minimum wage set at seventy-five cents an hour, a whopping 80 percent of all American families would soon own an automobile.

  Reading that trend, a hopeful German carmaker was daringly exporting its first peacetime products to America. But the few thousand comically hunchbacked contraptions they called Beetles, were seen in U.S. carmaker boardrooms only as a short-lived curiosity and hardly a threat to Detroit’s mighty, Big Three. Ensconced as the manufacturing muscle which had won World War II, it was absurd to think that any offshore carmaker could ever dethrone the likes of General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler!

  The throwaway society spawned by commonplace plastics was also still in its embryonic stages. But, a practical transistor had recently been born of an early synthetic resin. Shortly, it would make its humble public début and unseat the cumbersome vacuum tube. Armed with such instant-on compactness, neophyte electronics industries would soar to magical heights. The fledgling school of astroscience could now begin suffering through the many miscarriages and birthing pains that would ultimately put men on the moon and microwave ovens in every house.

  Closer to home, things around the Great Lakes were also germinating. In Chicago, Cook County Clerk, Richard J. Daley had won his first mayoral race, setting in motion a generation long, iron-fisted political dynasty over, The City of Big Shoulders. A little further west, nearby Des Plaines was unveiling a radical concept of quick service dining that came with a pair of golden arches.

  Although it would be nearly another decade before ground would break for the first true malls, blueprints for shopping plazas were currently being laid in the eager hands of building contractors, so starting the determined march of trademarked chain stores across the landscape and setting in motion the death knell for leagues of honorable mom-n-pop shops.

  But, for the time being, Mayhew neighborhood constants, like Poulson’s corner grocery and Walkowiak’s Hardware & Appliance, were still firmly entrenched, conducting the same brisk walk-in business as they had for decades. And a solid patron to all local commerce was this town’s railroad.

  The heavily worked tracks of the Chicago, Cahokia, and Southern Railway slashed like a raw saber cut, through the town’s vitals. Its elevated twin mainlines and dozen assorted sidings amounting to well-polished, life-giving, steel arteries. And here, as part of its 300-mile-long Prairie Division, was the Mayhew satellite freight yard.

  Fondly known as the, Crippled, Constipated, and Stubborn to its workers, the road was branded across the upper Midwest in the shape of a capital letter T, with outstretched arms that braced against Iowa and Indiana. A mighty taproot ran straight south, dragging along a mesh of supporting capillaries, that nicked western Kentucky and Tennessee, before wandering about the Arkansas and Mississippi state lines.

  Claiming only 1800 miles of track with 250 locomotives, and 7000 employees, the CC&S was small for a Class 1 railroad, mirroring rather, the subdivision of some larger, transcontinental player. Yet, it was the equal of any Midwestern pike and had faithfully employed many local men for a century. Television was still a relatively new commodity in Mayhew. But, the railroad was a trusted, old friend.

  Just as the members of tribal bloodlines are decreed to follow clan totems, so a railroading life appeared destined for Jim Graczyk. The yard smoke and cinders wafting down his 54th Street home had early on, sprinkled his pregnant mother Sarah, like a sorcerer’s magic dust, ordaining both his and older brother Mike’s place, in the future role call of CC&S trainmen. Nursery rhymes sung to the youngsters were laced with tales of choo-choo trains and the boys recognized nearby whistle talk of jockeying steamers while still only tykes, reinforcing the tradition.

  But Jim, as the youngest of the Graczyk brothers, was slender and lithe, with the tranquil green eyes of his mother and a gentleness in features that set him apart from the chiseled visage of older brother, Mike, or father, Joe. And although Jim had certainly been born into a railroading family, there too, he was set apart.

  Today, the young man was returning from uptown Mayhew on foot. By now, most local families owned a car. Yet, with the array of neighborhood businesses placed in easy walking distance, sidewalk traffic was still common and Jim finished the las
t few blocks of his return home, before making ready for his afternoon switchman’s job.

  That morning had been a pleasant time for a walk. The scorching weather was giving way to a more accommodating Indian summer, bringing a sweet taste of coming fall. But, Jim’s easy stroll took a dim turn in rounding the next corner.

  There, he spied her, the pretty young widow, tending her baby in a small park. She was smartly attired, as though a businesswoman on her lunch hour. And though her white blouse and navy blue skirt were a bit out of place among the smattering of casually dressed elderly, otherwise peopling the place, on her, the dress code was a very becoming mix of reserve with a touch of chic.

  Her blond hair was worn medium length, her angular face, flawlessly made-up. Elsewhere, the alluring shade of red lipstick she’d chosen might’ve given the young woman a seductive look. But here, there was no public preening or self-absorbed posturing, just the dignified presence of a homegrown beauty. Hers was a relaxed sense of self and a refreshing harbor, amid a sea of young women only too accustomed to men’s attention.

  Their eyes met at the moment of his appearance and there was no chance in either pretending not to have seen the other. But the young woman offered a welcoming smile that was sincere and with no escape, Jim threw on a quick mantle of nonchalance.

  She spoke first, greeting from her place on the bench.

  “Hello Jim.”

  Among everyone living in Mayhew, she was one of only two people who never called him Jimmy and it pleased him immensely to hear her say his name. Coming to a stop, Jim took in the woman’s young daughter, also fashionably garbed.

  “Lorraine,” he answered in polite reply. “You ladies look very nice today.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you headed off someplace special?”

  She shook her head.