Fiona Jones, Scotland
When you travel by rail instead of road, the world is a different place.
An older place, narrower, unlabelled beyond brief names of stations passed and schedules of stops to come. You have no choices to navigate; you are a passenger of unmarked miles, invisibly drawn along the double track that never changes route, a watcher of the scene that changes instead by season, weather and sky.
You see going by you the undersides and backs of towns and countryside: Long rows of terraced houses with their laundry, bins and clutter. Old things and forgotten, scrapyards and swampish neglected meadows. Stone walls and wooden fences disintegrating into long stretches of time alongside your own journey. Brambles, weeds and nettles, yearly swallowing trackside rubbish and grime.
Without any uphill or downhill of your own, you rise above treetops one moment and drop under bridge or tunnel the next, flying past pausing pedestrians, flashing past old sidings of rusting rails. Between trees and buildings you briefly glimpse the ever-busy roads that run along the front and centre of places, but in your caterpillar-millipede of train yours is the outside, sidelong, backwards, the overhead and underground, viewpoints of birds and snails, framed within the hundred years of rush and silence.
On a different timeline of human history—a different route of invention and necessity—Barsanti and Matteucci never happen to meet, MacAdam stays in New York, Ford or Midgley runs away to sea as a boy. Trains adapt quickly while cars fall behind. Smart-switching systems of trains to trams thread their own pattern by now, pulling settlement and industry towards their amenity. The railways take the front and not the back of buildings, towns and open spaces, while narrow untarred roads wander between, behind, beyond.
And the world, perhaps, lasts longer.
Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. She has been a regular contributor to Folded Word, Mum Life Stories and Elsewhere Journal, and her fiction appears on Silver Pen, Buckshot Magazine and various other venues. Fiona's published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.