“Shown here is a somewhat dehumanized, life-size bronze figure of a human being of no particular sex, age, race, culture, or environment. Compressed between the two wheels, it seems to present humanity as the victim of its own complicated inventions. The wheels also symbolize the blind ups and downs of fortune. The date 1965 is inscribed on the base, and the whole sad assemblage seems to say that human history and civilization have not exactly turned out as was once more hopefully expected.
“There’s nothing that stirs my imagination like the sound of a steam locomotive — that lonesome whistle cutting through the night and that column of black smoke and steam throwing shadows across the land. When I was a boy the trains ran by my house and they carried with them a promise that somewhere down the track anything would be possible.”
