The Mule

The rail crews call it the Mule because it is stubborn, it is ugly, and it will not quit.

Somebody took a farm tractor, the kind that spent forty years pulling a plow through the same six fields, and cut the rubber off it. Steel wheels went on instead, with flanges turned on a lathe in a barn somewhere. Now it runs on the rails, and it does the work that used to take a locomotive and four men.

It pulls two cars. That is all it can pull. Going up the river grade it slows to a walk, and the fireman on the following train has time to get off, walk alongside, and light his pipe before he needs to climb back on.

Nobody minds. Before the Mule, that section of line was dead for six years because the big engine at the top of the grade had a cracked block and nobody could cast a new one. Then Marta Voss drove her father's tractor onto the rails at the Dunmore crossing and proved that slow beats stopped.

There are nine of them on the northern lines now. Every one is a different tractor, and every one has different wheels, because every barn does it a little differently. The Rail League does not care. They stamp a number on the frame, write down what it can pull, and put it to work.

Marta still drives the first one. She keeps a coffee can of grease on the fender and a photograph of her father wedged behind the gauge cluster, and she has never once let anyone else take it up the grade.