I’ve never seen one, but they’ve been reported for well over a century, nearly since the invention of the train itself. These trains shouldn’t even be there, and they intrude upon our reality, our perception of what is possible. But there are trains, some say, that run on their own tracks, on tracks that aren’t even really there, on tracks that were abandoned years ago. The train I heard as a boy intruded on my sleep.

It’s huge, longer than a skyscraper is tall, and it takes a long time to crawl past us so we can be on our way. We’re trying to get somewhere in a hurry and the lights start to flash and the blockade arms go down and we’re waiting for ten minutes while a freight train crosses our path. Sometimes trains can intrude upon our lives. I think they serve as a reminder that once, real trains broke through the dense forest, intruding into a wild place that eventually shut them out and left them for dead. These are mighty machines from the golden age of steam and must have been worth a fortune in their day and yet, at some point in their history, someone left them where they sat, two behemoths of iron nearly a hundred tons each, a hundred miles from any discernible tracks. In a place with nothing but untamed wilderness as far as the eye could see, we walked a path into the dense forest to discover two steam locomotives just sitting there rusting away as time ticked on. Once, my father took me to the Allagash to see something strange and wonderful - the ghost trains. Trains were a mystery to me, and I loved them. My parents had taken the B&A to Bangor for their honeymoon, but by the time I was a kid, no passengers rode the rails. Even though my neck of the woods was lonely, there were train tracks connecting that loneliness to the wider world, somewhere out there. I never saw the night train - I only ever heard its wail. I never knew if it was headed north or south. It was a sign of life, the Bangor and Aroostook. It broke the stone silence of my world like a knife, a long, lonesome whistle from over the hill next to the Aroostook River Valley, where the tracks ran. When I was a boy, I used to hear the train in the distance in the middle of the night.

Way to the woods 2019 steam