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The Station
By Gordon Strachan

Not many trains pulled in at the station anymore; all the big inner city stations had grown and rarely did anyone want to get off several miles from the city. Only tourists, wanting to see the countryside (and even they were spreading their numbers thin) hopped off and onto the humble platform.

Of course, there would always be commuters from the villages nearby. Every morning, an hour or so after sunrise, these small numbers skulk morbidly from the platform onto the trains, always looking to the ground, with unified contempt toward their lifestyle, their unfortunate dependence on the city.

Dylan always disliked the commuters. It occurred to him a long time ago that they begrudged his station as though it was its fault for forcing them to travel into the city. He'd been the Station Master for a few years now and he'd realised that, if anything, the station should be savoured; the last chance to take in the unpolluted air, the blue skies and the endless fields of green and golden crops, all laid out for the passengers to see before the trains arrived to ferry them away. Instead, the commuters kept their eyes to the cold, grey floor of the platform. Each day, they'd shuffle on and off the trains, zombies of the lifeless industrial world. Dylan looked at the platform and viewed the passengers as the ugliest aspect of the station; they made the dull grey of the rough granite walls and the hard concrete floor infinitely more appealing and far more colourful than any character standing there.

Dylan considered the station as his home. Ever since he was young, only about seven or eight, Dylan sat on the platform, waiting for his father to return home from work. A strong, big built character, taller than all the other dads, he seemed out of place as a conductor on the railways, but Dylan idolised him. For such a small boy, there was something strangely heroic about his father's arrival each day on an impressive steam engine, a gradually dying breed as the modern electric shuttles took control. It would roll into the station with a great sense of honour and power, something Dylan always related to his father in the same way as a knight’s greatness is measured by his horse. Every evening, the passengers would filter off the last train in a flurry of colourful clothes and heavy luggage. Back then the station was much busier, not so many motorways meant more hopping from station to station. Dylan always felt a tingling surge of anxiety whenever the crowds died down and he still couldn’t see his father. He’d jump as high as he possibly could, in the hope that he’d spy a glimpse of the shiny navy blue conductor hat. Of course, Dylan knew that his fears were unfounded, as he learnt with each passing evening, yet it still sent a prickling shiver down his back. Once the last passenger was off the carriages, there his father would be, stepping from the train with great power and dominance; the most important man on the platform. He’d look around a few times, pretending not to notice his son, a lost expression on his face. Dylan had realised long ago that this was a little game his father was playing with him, but nevertheless, he’d jump and shout as loud as he could to get his attention. Slowly, his dad would follow the sound, still with his confused expression, until he stood right in front of his son. Suddenly, he’d pretend to spot his Dylan, and he’d pick him up and spin him round and round in the air, wide grins on both their faces; the game never got old.

One evening, a few days short of his eleventh birthday, Dylan had sat at the station, his back against one of the round pillars, patiently waiting for the last train to roll in. The remnants of summer could be felt; the warm evening air, the peaceful reddening sky as the sun prepared to set. Dylan loved the sun when it was setting because, for that one moment in the day, he could look at the sun without hurting his eyes. The orange glow seemed to intensify all the colours of the landscape, and made every shadow far more dramatic. Even Dylan’s shadow stretched all the way behind him to the next pillar. Shadows were funny things, he’d always wondered if you could escape it; to somehow detach yourself from the trailing dark figure. One of the things he hated about school was its intent on destroying his silly thoughts, out to prove his little thoughts were wrong.

A train shot by. Not his fathers though, just another electric train, already shoving the dignified steam engines into extinction. Even his father was threatened with the prospect of having to transfer to one of the modern atrocities. Dylan feared that one day his father would pull in at the station on an unflattering and degrading heap of steel. Dylan remembered the nightmares he’d had back then that the loss of the steam engines somehow meant the loss of his father.

Little had he realised how true this would be. That evening, his father never appeared off the train.

Waiting long into the night, Dylan waited for him. Looking into the sky, he stared blankly at the stars. It couldn’t have been a clearer night, but his eyes were clouded with tears. The steam engine slept silently, motionless beside the platform. After checking everywhere throughout the carriages, it only then dawned on Dylan that he’d been left alone.

A week later, Dylan and his mother received news from the local police that they’d found his father. A burst of excitement rose inside Dylan at these words, thinking that his father had just been hiding, but the tone in the policeman’s voice was disconcerting. They told them that the day he’d gone missing was the day he’d been made redundant. The police had concluded that he’d led himself to a bridge just outside the village and jumped. His body was spotted by fishermen downstream, caught in the bushes.

For a long time, Dylan hated his father for ending his life. By trying to run from the indignity of redundancy, he’d left in his trail an entirely undignified image of his death. Dylan even blamed himself, thinking that if he hadn’t idolised his father so much, he wouldn’t have let his father think his job was so important that it was worth taking his life for. All of these thoughts were irrelevant though. In the end, it didn’t matter why or how everything worked out. What did matter was that his father loved him, and despite Dylan’s confused thoughts, he loved him too.

Every night, Dylan sat by his pillar at the station. Watching the trains pulling in and whizzing by. Watching the clouds float silently and softly overhead. Eventually, the steam engines were decommissioned and the shuttle trains took hold. His father’s train wasn’t scrapped however; a separate piece of track was laid alongside the working tracks, where it sat opposite the platform as a monument to the splendour of a dead age.

Dylan grew up with the station, getting to know the workers who took him in like a little brother, and now, he was Station Master, wearing the same uniform as his father once had, as proud of the job as he had been. In some little way, Dylan was still with his dad, the steam engine forever residing by his platform. For the few passengers that looked around, the steam train was a beautiful and elegant monument, but for Dylan, it was a physical memory of his father.