Yellow boxcars

My usual driving route to Lancaster and points east, once I crest Chickies Hill, is Route 30, a busy limited access highway with two narrow lanes running in each direction, divided by a wide swath of weedy median. It isn't a beautiful stretch of road, and the traffic is, although not as heavy as in larger metropolitan areas, fast moving with the occupants of cars and trucks mostly intent on getting where they're going rather than taking in the meager semi rural farm, light industrial and suburban landscape through which this stretch of pavement cuts. Not inviting for a scenic view stop. No scenic view to stop for.

Lately though, I've been noticing a chain of rusty old yellow boxcars on an abandoned section of track in the middle of the snowy fields. A scene that I am drawn to for its starkness. It strikes me somehow as stately in its loneliness, a tangle of scrubby growth almost indistinguishable from the dark rust stained wheel carriages, the tracks mostly hidden. Something fascinates me about these disintegrating shapes sweeping in a truncated arc on a rail spur coming from and leading nowhere. Almost an architectural ruin in a ravaged landscape. A fragment of order whose fabric is leaching into the ground.

So, this afternoon I turned my car around at the Columbia-Marietta exit and drove back, pulling off the road and walking a cold and dirty quarter mile alongside the stream of roaring traffic. A couple of iPhone photos for reconnaisance. A hasty sketch. And sometime soon, on a warmer day but I hope with snow still on the ground, I'll return to see in greater depth and try to understand my attraction to these decaying remnants of times past.

yellow boxcars, 11-1/2 x 8-1/4, Derwent Inktense pencils