smoke pouring out of a box car door

I discovered this as a book mark in a book recently. I was reading Ricouer's Conversation and Critique - a book length interview about his life and the development of his thought, when I came across this newspaper clipping. I had clipped it away because just as I opened the page to it, Dylan's song Idiot Wind, which has the lyric "smoke pouring out of a box car door", was playing. I turned the page and almost in time with the music there was the image. It's a harsh song saved by Dylan's implication of himself: that he as well is an idiot, lucky enough to be able to feed himself: and that thinking of what might have been, he feels so sorry.
A lone soldier on the cross.
I'm fascinated by trains. My studio is near the tracks and every time a train goes by I go outside to watch. Trains continue to be romantic images to me. When I lived in New Mexico the train tracks often paralleled the road. Driving along I would see a train coming and I could tell how long it was - no trees or hills obscured it. Sometimes I would catch up with a train as it flew down the road.
Night time is when I find trains to be most mysterious: only a few lights define a massive shape moving through space. The train is almost invisible at night, yet I can feel the heaviness. In Europe one of my pleasures there was riding from Prague to Budapest. Even though it was a bit uncomfortable [the dining car didn't go - as the conductor told us- and we were forced to jump off the train at a border station and retrieve some drinks and food before the train left the station] I enjoyed sitting in our compartment and watching the towns go by, very slowly in Czech, and then, passing through Slovakia, gaining speed into Hungary as we followed the Danube. We passed quickly through rich farmland.
How nice it would be to still be able to ride the rails here. Amtrak counts only in the northeast. If I could take a train from Decatur to Athens or to Macon or Covington, that would be more of what I'm thinking of.
Next year in Chicago I may take the El to the Art Institute - it seemed so brisk running into the city next to the interstate. What must it be like inside?