Anywhere Else For Any Other Reason

It was a gray and overcast morning when we began stoking the fire on Old No. 11 for a chartered run down the mountain branch line and along the main line to Three Kings Crossing.  The tender engine - silver but blackened with decades of coal soot - steamed out of the station with its trailing passenger coach and down through the canyon, rattling across the switch at Sixpoints Junction and down the mainline.  I bade the fireman shovel on the coal for a chance to stretch the old locomotive's legs on the smooth track, but despite our best efforts, the former express engine would not reach its old speed.  Sticking brakes and dropping boiler pressure hampered us right up until we had to slow for track work north of Dogwood goods yard and the sawmill.  But this was a pleasure charter anyway, and our passengers were more interested in the quaint pastures around Benatry and the scenic Verdant Tunnels than in making time.  

A little tank engine whistled to us as it trundled back and forth along its industrial siding; we whistled back.  From there we shortly crested the ridge and began heading downhill towards Three Kings Crossing, flashing past an oncoming pair of black locomotives double-heading a local freight up the opposite line, and passing a pair of brightly-painted boxcars in a siding at the next station.  We ourselves had to pull into a siding not long after to better allow the Express to thunder by at ninety miles an hour on its way to Crescent City.

In the end, we arrived at Three Kings Crossing  a full four minutes ahead of schedule.  We had a long halt in which those passengers not making the full round trip boarded or disembarked - Three Kings is where the mainline diverges into the routes to Crescent City to the north and the distant Kwomais harbour to the south.  But, in time, the guard whistled us out of the station and we set off again - uphill this time, though on a diversionary line with a shallower grade.  Old No. 11 performed well - she may not have clung to her old speed, but she still had more than enough torque for the ascent, and wheelslip was not an issue.

From that point on, the journey back was much the same, only in reverse.  We saw the tank engine once again, switching off the mainline and disappearing up its spur.  Other than that, the only thing to note was that we met the Wheatonville Flyer on the opposite track after we had passed north of Dogwood and just before we left the mainline at Sixpoints Junction; the golden engine steaming along brilliantly.  It was a wonderful final bit of excitement - from there, it was a milk run up the branch line to the water tower at the roundhouse.

(What actually happened:  I walked a dog down the neighborhood's biggest gravel trail to the point where it joined two other trails.  We saw a pug and a wheaton terrier.  It was delightful.)

Plopped into ruins of forgotten walls and floors. Stretches in front of me are a mixture of crumbling old walls, trading with desolation and overgrowing vines and plants.  I am trying to navigate it, but the chaos itself is like a maze. Trying to find my friends and family, but the unfamiliarity and sense of decay are causing pause. Where do I turn? Where do I go? I see over the horizon a castle - that is my target, but the road is unclear. I turn a corner, and the scene changes; now it is fully overgrown. The next turn, it is empty and dusty. The next turn, it is full of pits, poison, and remains. How did I get here, and where do I go..forever on and on.