Growing up, I loved listening to the whistles of trains blowing in on the south wind at night. Sometimes I could even hear the clack-clack, clack-clack of the wheels rolling over the rails. The repetition offered something of a comfort as I drifted to sleep, the audible equivalent of a rocking motion.

The clacking has come from my keyboard this month. I've written 30,062 words in a surge to finish a project that intersected with railroad history more than I had expected.

At some point in my research, I found the stero-card images of John Carbutt, a photographer based in Chicago. The major railroads paid for him to accompany PR tours in the late 1860s. Two disruptive technologies, as we'd call them today, fused in Carbutt: the camera and the locomotive. Although I didn't end up incorporating his photos, I loved looking through them.

The Transcontinental Railroad united America with a "strong band of iron" but also caused environmental ruin, provoked racist actions against Irish and Chinese immigrant workers, and destroyed Native American people and cultures. Archives help us now reclaim those facets of the story.

My lead photo depicts the end of the line, a terminus with no tracks ahead. As a philosopher, I'd ask you to consider the opposite. You might see a beginning.

I owe a bunch of you email responses after ignoring my inbox for 31 days. Until then, this poem about the "line of hot iron" seems destined for this newsletter, but if you'd like a lighter fare, head to Track 2.
 

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This newsletter was written on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank.