Unit train

 I turned right in town and drove to the west past the unit train loading outfit. As I drove I fell to thinking about this place, what it is and what it was.  Sixty years ago, I knew it simply as "the elevator".  It bought and sold six or seven kinds of grain, sold feeds and feed premixes as well as seeds and provided coal for home heating.  Instead of today's constant line of semi tractors and grain trailers there were mostly farm tractors pulling farm wagons, sometimes hitched in pairs.  Some of the more up and coming farmers drove products in on single axle trucks.  A feed delivery truck ran constantly between the elevator's feed mill and surrounding farms. When grain left the community it did so by boxcar, perhaps several being loaded at a time.

Today there is no feed mill and no feed delivery truck.  The elevator sells no coal, no seed, no fertilizer.  It sells grain by the unit train, fifty two cars or 104 cars-all hopper bottom-at a time.  That is all it does.  There is no loading platform and no gaggle of teenage boys sitting on it smoking cigarettes and watching the town after hours. 

We were richer then and didn't know it.