This train stops at West Station, a desolate station. I heard that in the past it was a station where you could flag down the train, but now it has been changed for standardization.

      This station doesn't use electronic screens or loudspeakers to announce train numbers. Instead, a staff member holds a sign with the train number and uses a megaphone to call out the train. It feels like going back to the last century, adding a unique touch to the fast-paced life of the 21st century.

      To board this train, one must go through a long and narrow underground passage. The passage is narrow and low, with smooth yet speckled concrete walls. At the corners, water drips down along cracks, gathering into shallow muddy water that flows along the edges of the steps. The steps have been worn into slight arcs by constant foot traffic. Near the middle, the bottom few steps have been worn flat, with some dust accumulated in the depressions. Passing through the passage, a sliver of sky light filters through the gaps in the grille above, with dust floating in the beams of light. Because this is a branch line, almost all the trains running are freight trains. There are many tracks, scattered like rusty veins winding around the station area. And the only platform stands isolated among these rails. There are no signs here, only a wooden station nameplate with peeling paint and slightly blurred lettering. The ground is cement-sprinkled gravel, where small stones are often lifted by the wind and fall back into the cracks. Several tracks extend parallel, the gravel between sleepers and rails flattened by passing wheels, the rail surfaces glinting coldly. The platform edge is marked with a yellow warning line, now faded from years of trampling. All of this is full of echoes of history, melodious and lonely, with a long-lost sense of desolation, as if traveling back to some abandoned subway platform, or a dream deep in memory.

      With a series of clanging sounds, the train slowly pulls into the platform. Its body is green, with peeling paint revealing the primer. The windows are square, framed in black metal, with glass that has been dusty for years. The doors slide open on rollers, with rust marks of varying depths on the tracks. Between cars, rubber buffer belts connect them, their surfaces cracked.

      At one corner of the platform, a young couple stand with backpacks. The backpacks are made of canvas, worn at the edges; the scarves are fine cloth, with neat edges. Their silhouettes seem out of place in this environment, yet they walk through it with ease. I understand them, because I am like them—not forced to take this train for travel, but specifically to experience such a journey, in this era where life moves at a suffocating pace, to slow down, and slow down even more. Perhaps that's why they walk so quietly, not speaking, not rushing to board, just stepping forward as if listening to the breath of the railway. They do not belong to the past, nor entirely to the present; they are people who come with the future, trying to understand, from a green carriage, those who silently supported this land.

      Some say that such trains should have been phased out long ago. Tattered carriages, hardwood seats, coughing out a mouthful of coal smell every now and then. But it was precisely this train that, over the years, sent countless mountain children out of the mountains, carrying heavy sacks of cotton, apples, and hope to the plains and cities, time and again. This is not a means of transport; it is a flow of memory. I sit by the window, the glass beside me already blurred, and a scrape of my fingernail can bring down a layer of frost-like moisture. As the train starts, the scenery outside flashes by—the dilapidated edges of a city: half-built buildings, abandoned factories, and rusted water towers, like scars the city cannot hide, lightly brushed over by this train and silently erased.

      The scenery outside slowly recedes. Accompanying this train are silver-white high-speed trains roaring past in the distance, clean and sharp, like streaks of light cutting through the sky. They are a symbol of another direction of this era—speed, efficiency, technology—carrying the expectations of another kind of people. And our green train, still relying on its diesel engine, sways and jolts across the Gobi and hills, traveling on tracks forgotten by most.

      This train is in no hurry, nor does it care about cost. It just stubbornly runs on its own track, like a ray of light in the cracks of time, illuminating those who still live quietly, and also illuminating the young couple sitting by the window. They are looking at the scenery outside, and the scenery is looking at them. They may not realize the weight on their shoulders, but at this moment, their silence has already responded for the future.

      The sky outside gradually darkens. The western dusk paints heaven and earth in a quiet gray-orange. The distant mountain shadows stretch like crouching old figures of the earth, silently watching this old train pass through. It is not noisy, not dazzling, but like the aftertone of history, slowly lengthening, echoing low in the wind.

      I take such a train in the northwest, in memory of the old Chengdu-Kunming railway line, built by the people of the southwest many years ago, but now abandoned.