Trains, when choo-chooing through dreams or films, are symbolic vehicles. With its churning pistons, lurching steel wheels, and spume-spouting smoke stack rollicking rigidly along irreversible rails, the locomotive is a perfect representation of the forward-thrusting male libido. An atmospheric and melancholic metaphor of waning potency, Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day (1996) creates art from the doomed and romantic struggle of one man to save the famously scenic Yosemite Valley Railroad at the end of World War II. The noble and outmatched protagonist is descended from the immigrant Chinese laborers who laid the Yosemite’s original tracks. Even with this pedigree and the most noble of intentions, can he reverse the natural and economic factors that are sweeping his cherished representation of reproductive power toward the scrapheap of impotence and irrelevance?