Seaboard System Railroad

This is it. This is the one. Twelve Eleven. I remember the encounter like it was yesterday. The whine of the turbo. The towering cab. The bulky boxy body. The stance on its pair of Blombergs like it meant business. This hiss of the air spitter. The sheen of the business gray. The pop of the stripes. This is the locomotive that made me a Diesel fanatic. No. 1211. A MP15T from the good people of General Motors, where "T" in the model stands for turbo. Only 42 ever rolled off the line, and all but one of them hired on with the Seaboard System; they were all only three years away from LaGrange when I snapped this photo in Jacksonville of the twelfth in the litter. I watched this gray monster grab on to cut after cut of Seaboard business and drag it all around the yard's throat. These where they days when you stand close enough to the tracks to feel the action vibrate your chest, without anyone with a company badge coming by to shoo you away. That is, as long as you were not in the way. And the Old Man taught me how not be in the way. So we stood there for a while, he and I, and we watched unhindered as this marvelous machine did its intended work. And on that spot I was hooked. Twelve years old, and I was hooked on Diesels for the rest of my life. Tell me again how oil from the ground gets made to move and then squirted and squeezed in a chamber, only to explode one way and then retreat another, and it happens all over again, everyone turning a shaft which turns some wires which turn in a winding until voltage is made and moved to more windings, and then to motion, and then to gears, and then to wheels, and then there is movement of a quarter mile's worth of steel structures riding on springs and ball bearings. I still say, even now, it's pure magic.