The Ghosts Of Duffy Street [Barbershopped]

[Intro] [Verse 1] In the yard at Mohavé, the morning was dry and wide Sixty-nine hoppers of trona were waiting for the ride Destined for the valley where the heavy iron curls They hitched up S P 7 5 5 1 to lead the train But the burden they were hauling was a heavy end chain [Verse 2] The clerk looked at the manifest, he wrote down what he saw Six thousand tons of cargo was the number for the law But the bill of lading lied that day, the truth was left behind Three thousand tons of extra weight, a ghost within the load Setting up a funeral upon the mountain road [Verse 3] Frank Holland was the engineer, a man who knew the rail With Lawrence Hill the conductor, they set out on the trail Young Victor Augustine was there, the brakeman on the run Six engines pulling hard and true to reach the mountain crest Before they turned the heavy nose to put the steel to test [Chorus] [vocal harmonies] Oh, the Cajón Pass is steep, boys, and the mountains mighty tall And a heavy load of trona makes a fearful way to fall The needles on the gauges start a-climbing toward the red The train became a monster like the old-timers said Frank Holland fought the throttle while the air began to scream But 7 5 5 1 was lost inside a nightmare scheme [crescendo] At ninety miles an hour, the world began to blur [Verse 4] And the only thing that they could hear, they hit the curve at Duffy Street The earth was sliced in two The engines tore through houses in a storm of wood and dust Leaving wreckage in the garden beds and iron turned to rust Two young boys were taken when the walls came crashing down A silence fell like heavy lead upon the broken town The crew was crushed in twisted steel, the end was swift and hard A graveyard made of quiet boulevard [Bridge] The big machines came rolling in to clear the tangled path To move the days that passed away, the sun was shining clear On the morning of the twenty-fifth, no sign of fear Until a vapor line where a neighbor was torn As a geyser of white gasoline was suddenly reborn Three hundred feet it sprayed the rooftops high A fountain poison reaching for the morning sky A pilot tiny spark doesn't take much more To turn a quiet neighborhood into a field of war The fireball hit the heavens with a roar of orange breath Burning cars like candle wax and burning in the shed The heat was so intense it turned the pavement into glass The fuel from the pipeline fed the fire in the path [Outro] Two more lives were lost that day within the rain along the dusty street The inspectors wrote the story of the weight they didn't know Now the white crosses stand silent where the trona used to lie Near the tracks of San Bernardino underneath the sky Yeah, the Waltz of Steel and Mountain is a dangerous song to play Watch the gradient, watch the weight, and keep the pressure high Before the geyser goes reaching for the sky May of eighty-nine