Trains don’t stop here, not for people

Trains don’t stop here, not for people. You can take that in at least two ways and both would be true. Playing on the tracks, hiking near the track, looking for scrap or anything fallen off a train, or even thinking about it will get you killed. It’s an on/off switch. Those are the words of my elders, not my words. I repeat them now as if my own just as they have done ever since those funny talking sweaty men laid down those ties and attached those long and heavy piece of iron against them without looking up. They just kept on going like the machines that run on them, thoughtless, heartless, loud and smelly.

The nearest town down the line is almost thirty miles in either direction. Shouldn’t the railroad company have put in depot here, a watering stop, something? There wasn’t any water here, they told us, and that our people needed what little water there was. Since we are located in an area of limited resources, the projections were that not only would our population not increase, this place would become another ghost town along the way. Of course, none of this was true. We didn’t, I didn’t know it at the time. But I think most of the elders knew. A few folks my parents’ age tried to get a petition going, to sway the railroad company into stopping here. That didn’t last long. The elders called a meeting. Everybody talked quietly way late into the night. Later that day the elders talked the railroad company into putting in a switch out for the new warehouse and storage building going in. Nobody knew anything about a warehouse. But the elders produced a planned out drawing of the whole thing, showed it to the foreman and the manager and some guy in a suit like it was common knowledge, ancient history. We all knew it was what they’d been meeting about all night long.

Twice a year the warehouse gets filled to capacity. A train comes and hauls off everything inside. A second train drops off supplies and fills it up again. We have a big party so everyone can take what supplies they need balanced against how much they put in to the warehouse before the first train came. Four trains a year stop here, not for people, but for things. Passenger service is almost thirty miles in either direction. Not a lot of strangers come around. Hardly anybody ever goes anywhere.