We chewed up about 1,500 miles of highway, stopping in Buffalo to do a bit of work on the renewable ammonia project there, we spent a morning with Barry Welsh, the Democratic candidate for Indiana district 6, then on to my home in the Iowa Great Lakes region.
The fifteen minute drive to the train station in Massachusetts would have been fine, but Omaha, Nebraska or Ottumwa, Iowa are the best Amtrak terminals for that region – but each is a solid two hundred miles from my home. So much for seeing America by rail.
There is a sad artifact from a happier age of rail transport not far from my home and we took the chance to visit it while we were there.
I discovered Iowa’s Ghost Train last fall during my search for abandoned farmsteads to photograph. Iowa, like most of the land west of the Mississippi, is part of the Louisiana purchase and every time I had to go somewhere in the four county Iowa Great Lakes region I’d take a different set of turns, stopping to photograph the many decaying farmhouses that fill the region.
The passenger cars were formerly operated by the Algoma Central railroad in Canada, but they made their way to a little dinner train line based in Spirit Lake, Iowa, and came to their final resting place just west of Superior, Iowa when that operation failed. The track was taken up and exported to China without the benefit of a proper rail line abandonment procedure.
This part makes me saddest of all. My father was a lifetime railroad man and as a child I often walked one side of the train while he did the other, looking for ‘hot boxes’ and brake shoes in need of replacement. We’d stop in the caboose at the far end of the train and he’d fill out his daily report while I climbed into the cupola to play.
Yes, it’s in nearly perfect condition ... but totally unsafe. Urban America has crack cocaine and those of us in rural areas got another plague – the demon crystal meth. This lovely old caboose made a first class drug lab – heated by propane, alarmed, right next to a farm with animals which camouflaged the smell, and a town of less than a hundred has no full time police officer to notice comings and goings on a rail siding a mile outside of town.
Ephedrine, often extracted from over the counter cold medicines, is one of a handful of precursors to this drug. They put these medicines behind the counter and began requiring signatures for purchase a few years ago and lab discoveries in Dickinson County went from two a month in 2005 to two total in 2007, with my find of the lab in the caboose being one of those.
Some folks here dismiss the grim prediction that a third of our total housing inventory could go empty in the face of the subprime mess. I watched that scenario play out a generation ago due to the slow grind of farm consolidation and the very fast neutron bomb that Iowa Beef Packers dropped on Estherville with the mid 1980s closure of the packing plant. This is just a small sampling of the ninety locations I’ve photographed within a fifteen minute radius around my mother’s farm. A good 20% of the farmhouses in the area are going back to nature. We’ll be seeing more of this as the near doubling in propane prices the last few years makes its effect felt.
I have absolutely no doubt that we’re going to get knocked down by the subprime/banking fiasco just like we did in 1929, but unlike the Great Depression this time we don’t have massive oil reserves to drive economic expansion and even if we did climate change makes CO2 emissions on that scale an unwise move. I keep looking at this Pickens Plan thing, comparing it with the rail electrification and ammonia as a fuel information I have from Alan Drake and John Holbrook, and despite my famously doomerish temperament I am starting to get a bit of hope. That a man of Pickens’ stature, whatever his political leanings might be, is starting to push this issue into the national debate is a gift for those of us who’ve got a sensible plan for change. I fully approve of the wind energy aspect and while I dislike the CO2 from natural gas I am delighted to see a dialog starting about what to do with transportation as global oil production winds down.