From the highway just outside Burnet, Texas, the trains don’t look remarkable at first. Long, low cars. Pale stone. A steady, patient movement eastward. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might think it was just another freight run of grain, gravel, or something anonymous. But it isn’t anonymous. Those cars are filled with Hill Country caliche , scraped from land that took tens of thousands of years to form and only a few weeks to fracture and load. Carriage by
