The Night Train

The Night Train
Originally uploaded by Snurri.

"Trains still pass through the city at night. No one can say with certainty where they come from, or what their destination is. Many of them appear to be empty. They follow no schedule, but appear suddenly, glowing with unnatural light, never stopping. . . . In the first years of the city's exile Mayor Faldbakken III ordered the tracks pulled up in residential neighborhoods, particularly where they crossed busy streets . . . However, this soon led to trains passing down the streets themselves, as well as alleys and paths in the city parks; these trains would shriek through in the middle of the night, waking terrified residents to the flicker of spectral faces outside their bedroom windows. The trains left hot tracks in their wake, rails of superheated steel which sent more than one curious resident to the emergency room. . . . Today most residents prefer to ignore the night transit. There are trainspotting societies, however, such as the Motive Locos, who track the time and place of manifestations, plot them meticulously onto charts and graphs and maps and timetables and then endlessly debate them over pierogis at Klekatsky's Deli. And there are others who take an interest in the trains. Loners, mostly, who see them as a means of escape back to the world outside, or elsewhere, or wherever the world is now. Every few weeks the body of another hopeful is found, crushed among the ties or suspended in the gel-sap at the city's border. . . . There are, of course, tales of ghost-hoppers who have succeeded, but in the absence of evidence there is no reason to believe that any have returned via this route. Particularly if, as many amateur (and expert: Walter Wenstrup was among them) motivancers believe, they are the trains of the dead, and the city their last stop before hell." (p.122-4)