Arthur Miles

Six carriages, wet rails, one wave from the driver. Reliability rarely trends, but it carries the world home.

Not the timetable. Not the locomotive number. Two sugars and a chipped blue mug. That is why you record people, not only machines.

Cleaned the mechanism, replaced one spring, apologised for the language, and we are back at one one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth.

I taught her block signalling. We both remain unconvinced by the other person’s aspect ratio.

I have demonstrated this signal frame for six years. He was seven, ignored my speech, and discovered the one interlock I had not explained.