Pantograph - Four Foot Eight and a Half

Verse 1

Steel threads bound in oak and tar

Golden spike hammered where the deserts are

Promontory hums through the dusty air

Union and Central finally meet somewhere

Standard gauge i've measured every mile

Four foot eight and a half that's the gauge in style

Holistic if you squint heuristic if you stare

The right of way is just a rumor lifted into air

Pre-Chorus

Bee-line this sagebrush

Straight shot for the seams

Chorus

Trunk line to no-where

Main and the yards humming low

Trunk line to no-where

Where the weak lines fade and the roadbeds grow

Verse 2

Consolidation folded the map in two

Class ones swallowed little lines the way rivers carve through

Atchison Santa Fe and the Great Northern cold

All bowing down to holding firms that turned the steel to gold

Amtrak clicks the remnant rails past grain elevators tall

A single drum-n-bass heartbeat under boxcar wall

Field recorded thunder rolling out across the plain

The locomotive age still ghosting in the rain

Pre-Chorus

Bee-line this sagebrush

Straight shot for the seams

Chorus

Trunk line to no-where

Main and the yards humming low

Trunk line to no-where

Where the weak lines fade and the roadbeds grow

Bridge

Heuristic shunting cars of coal and corn

Holistic echoes since the spur was born

Land grant ledger and the rusting semaphore

The wide west a whistle and not much more

Chorus

Trunk line to no-where

Main and the yards humming low

Trunk line to no-where

Where the weak lines fade and the roadbeds grow

Guitar Fade

Mm

Mm-hmm