The Night Freight Yard

Lao Zheng has worked the night dispatch at the suburban marshaling yard for thirty years.

A marshaling yard at night is all lit up, the rails spreading out like veins in every direction. Lao Zheng's job is to sort the cars, give the signals, and send the freights off one by one — a quiet kind of busy that only the night shift understands.

The strange thing is track three.

Every night at seven minutes past two, a dark green train sits at the end of track three. No train number, no dispatch order, its lights dim. Lao Zheng checks the timetable; there is no such run. He asks the day dispatcher; no one sent it. The cars are the old slow-coach type that stopped at every station and was pulled from service more than twenty years ago.

The first time he saw it, Lao Zheng took it for a mis-shunted leftover and walked over to check. Through the windows sat rows of people, all with their heads down, as if asleep. But the train was cold, and no one answered when he knocked on the glass. He ran his flashlight down the length of it — and by the time he reached the front car, the train was simply gone. The track was empty, not a wheel, not a shadow.

He mentioned it to an old hand who had worked the yard since before it was built. The old man was silent a long while, then said: that slow train, the one that stopped everywhere — one winter it rear-ended another at the tunnel mouth up the line, and barely anyone on board lived. After that the run was scrapped and the cars cut up. But the night men all know: some nights you can still hear it come in.

Lao Zheng asked no more.

From then on, every night at 2:07, the moment that dark green train appeared at the end of track three, Lao Zheng would pick up the signal lamp and give it a clear — a green light, the kind you give a train that is allowed to proceed. Not for the living. For the run that never reached its station.

The other dispatchers saw him signal an empty track at that hour, night after night, and thought him touched. But the train, after he began signaling it, was always there — and always, a moment after his green light, it would fade away quietly, as if at last let into the station.

Once a young dispatcher asked what he was after. Lao Zheng said: that train has waited to arrive for twenty years. Someone ought to let it in.

Midnight Record note: A station is a place of arrivals and departures; some departures are final, but some arrivals never come. That dark green train at the end of track three was no ghost — it was a run that ended in the tunnel before it reached anyone waiting. Lao Zheng's nightly green light was not for a train of the living, but a small mercy to a journey with nowhere to go, at last let into the station: go on, you have arrived. A yard sorts a thousand cars a night, yet the signal that mattered most was the one he gave the empty track. All our lives we signal others onward; the kindest signal of all is the one we give to those who can no longer answer.