💾 Archived View for republic.circumlunar.space › users › joneworlds › 2021-01-18-soldier-train.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 04:03:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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I was sitting down by the railway tracks the other day, playing checkers with Dell and listening to my new radio, and also watching trains because I like looking at trains. You know, they are probably about the biggest thing most of us will ever see moving on the earth. But there's less coming through hre now than there used to be.
And then one finally comes, and it is another of those soldier trains. It has these short half-hight sides, but with gaps between the boards on the side panels, like a chopped cattle car. Over the short sides you can see the soldiers sitting on row benches, and they have on these weird baggy grey fatigues. And they got these ventilator marks, the kind with cannisters in the front. We can see some of them are already wearing them. And then there are a bunch of these super tall totally black box cars, and then some flatbeds with what might be machines on them, or big vats, or something. But they have wrapped in tarps so we can't tell. And we kind of just watch as all this goes by and disappears.
I don't know what they are. I haven't seen one in a couple of years, but I first saw one maybe almost 10 years ago by now, probably. And it seems like a pretty unusual thing, something that you'd hear about what it was, maybe even in the news. But I never heard anything, and no one knows anything, and that's the weirdest thing about it.
The person on the radio starts talking about interesting things you can add to your cocoa, and they're going to take some calls now. And then a crow poops on our checkerboard, which is kind of gross, but that's just part of playing checkers outside.