Pantograph - The Survey Lines

Verse 1

Steel ribbons fanning out from Omaha

On the old survey lines the surveyors drew

Standard gauge settled the argument in eighteen sixty-three

Four-foot-eight-and-a-half was the width they knew

Land grants bought the builders their right of way

Irish pick and Chinese sledge in the summer heat

They drove the golden spike at Promontory

Where the Central crossed the Union Pacific street

Pre-Chorus

Consolidation came with the twentieth century

Seven sisters swallowed all the little roads

The ICC watched from a dusty ledger desk

While the BNSF grew its heavy loads

Chorus

Trunk line to nowhere

But you kept every mile alive

Trunk line to nowhere

Steel and steam and diesel drive

From the Great Plains shunting yards

To the mountain passes in the sky

Trunk line to nowhere

But you carry everything by

Verse 2

Cornelius put his gold in the New York Central line

The Great Northern ran on Hill's tight disiplin

Deferred maintenance on a branch that lost its traffic

The abandonment hearings always seem to win

Snowsheds rotting on the old Cascade grade

The wrecker's torch took the roundhouse down

But the grain elevators still flash their angles

When the unit train comes rumbling through town

Pre-Chorus

The merger men drew maps in walnut boardrooms

Deregulation loosened every hand

A feeder branch survived on one grain shuttle

Where the big road needed the stand

Chorus

Trunk line to nowhere

But you kept every mile alive

Trunk line to nowhere

Steel and steam and diesel drive

From the Great Plains shunting yards

To the mountain passes in the sky

Trunk line to nowhere

But you carry everything by

Bridge

Reading the registry like scripture

Every subdivision logged and named

The helper district and the sagging trestle

The timetable where the ghosts remain

Hocket and double-track and CTC

The whole heuristics of the way

Somebody built it mile by desperate mile

And somebody still runs it today

Chorus

Trunk line to nowhere

But you kept every mile alive

Trunk line to nowhere

Steel and steam and diesel drive

From the Great Plains shunting yards

To the mountain passes in the sky

Trunk line to nowhere

But you carry everything by