Eastside Rail: Iron Veins

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
Atlanta & West Point tracks, laid in 1847,
iron veins cutting through the red clay,
separating us from Edgewood, from East Atlanta.
Lemuel P. Grant, you engineered this divide,
your rails hot under the July sun, scorching fingers
that dared to touch them in 1930.

[Chorus]
Oh, iron veins, you pulse with the city's blood,
CSX freight cars rumbling at 5:30 AM,
shaking bungalow windows on Hosea L. Williams Drive.
You carried coal and whispers of segregation,
Black families on this side, white on the other,
constant clack-clack, the neighborhood's heartbeat.

[Verse 2]
Georgia Railroad, finished in 1854,
John Thrasher's crews hammering spikes into earth,
creosote scent thick in the summer air,
marking boundaries we couldn't cross after dark.
James H. Carter remembered, in his 1985 words,
not just trains we feared, but the lines they drew.

[Chorus]
Oh, iron veins, you pulse with the city's blood,
CSX freight cars rumbling at 5:30 AM,
shaking bungalow windows on Hosea L. Williams Drive.
You carried coal and whispers of segregation,
Black families on this side, white on the other,
constant clack-clack, the neighborhood's heartbeat.

[Bridge]
And now, in the dawn light, I stand by the tracks,
feeling the ground tremble under my feet,
that ghostly whistle on moonless nights,
from the 1893 derailment no one recorded.
You still roll through, CSX, graffiti-covered cars,
linking past to present, division to whatever comes.

[Verse 3]
Black laborers, unnamed in the records,
laid these rails under brutal sun,
families displaced, their stories buried
like ties under gravel.
Yet your rhythm unites us, audible to all,
from Kirkwood porches to the Pratt-Pullman edge.

[Outro]
Iron veins, keep pulsing, keep rolling through.