— Did you hear it?
— What?
— The rails.
The Zone has something strange about them. Even when everything is quiet around you, they aren’t fully silent. They lay in the rusted weeds, crooked, darkened by the time, but still remember the weight. Wheels. People.
The railroad was built here long before the Catastrophe. Back when no one could have imagined a reactor, an evacuation, or the Zone itself. It was an ordinary line. Trains ran through Yaniv, passenger diesel trains were common. People stepped onto the platform; some met someone; others went on. An ordinary road. There were hundreds like it across the country.
And then it, like everything else here, was reshaped for a different life.
More precisely, for what remained after life.
One branch remained for service trains - through Semykhody, for those who traveled to the station to work. The others lay dormant for a long time, until they were repurposed for entirely different uses: for fuel, storage, technical logistics, and, no doubt, transporting something through some grim back alleys. In other words, the rails didn’t disappear. They simply changed hands.
And that is the essence of local railroad.
It doesn’t look like anything special. Rails, ballast, switches, old platforms. Rust in some places, new metal in others. But if you know what used to be right here and where all those rails lead, it feels completely different.
And when you look at these tracks stretching into the distance, there’s a strange feeling lurking behind it all, as if the road hasn’t ended yet, and it’s just that the destination is different now.
And it exists not for people, but for the Zone.
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