This train stops at West Station, a desolate stop. I've heard that it used to be a flag-stop station where you could wave the train down, but it was later converted for the sake of standardization.

      There's no electronic display board here, no loudspeaker announcing arrivals. Instead, a station worker holds up a sign with the train number and calls it out through a megaphone. It feels like stepping back into the last century—a splash of anachronistic color in the frantic pace of 21st-century life.

      To board this train, passengers must pass through a long, narrow underground passage. The corridor is low-ceilinged and cramped, its concrete walls smooth yet mottled with stains. In the corners, water drips along cracks, gathering into a shallow trickle of muddy water that flows along the edge of the steps. The stairs have been worn into a slight arc by countless footsteps; near the middle, the lower treads have been ground flat, with dust settling into the hollows. As you emerge from the passage, only a sliver of daylight filters through the grates overhead, dust motes floating in the beam. Because this is a branch line, the trains running here are almost all freight trains. The tracks sprawl in profusion, winding like rusted veins across the station yard, and the single platform squeezes forlornly between them. There are no signs here—only a wooden station nameplate with peeling paint and faded lettering. The ground is cement-smeared gravel, fine pebbles often lifted by the wind before settling back into the cracks. Several rails run parallel, the gravel between sleepers and steel tamped flat by countless wheels, the rail surfaces gleaming with cold light. The platform edge is marked by a yellow warning line, long since dimmed by years of trampling. Everything here echoes with history—melancholy and wistful, carrying a long-lost sense of desolation, like stepping back onto an abandoned subway platform, or into a dream buried deep in memory.

      With a rhythmic clatter, the train eases into the platform. Its body is green, with patches of paint peeling away to reveal the primer beneath. The windows are square, framed in black metal, their glass perpetually filmed with dust. The doors slide open on rollers, the tracks bearing rust stains of varying depth. Between carriages, rubber buffer strips connect them, their surfaces cracked with age.

      At one end of the platform, a young couple stands with their backpacks. The canvas of their packs is worn at the edges; their scarves are finely woven, the hems neat. Their silhouettes seem out of place against the surroundings, yet they walk through them with quiet composure. I understand them, because like me, they aren't taking this train out of necessity—they've come specifically to experience this kind of journey, to slow down, and slower still, in an era that suffocates with speed. Perhaps that's why they walk with such calm, not speaking, not hurrying to board, just stepping forward one pace at a time, as if listening to the breathing of the rails. They don't belong to the past, yet they don't fully belong to the present either. They are people carrying the future with them, trying to understand, from within a green carriage, the lives of those who once silently sustained this land.

      Some say trains like this should have been retired long ago. The shabby carriages, the hard wooden seats, the way it coughs up a mouthful of coal smoke after every stretch of track. But it was precisely this train that, over the years, carried countless children out of the mountains, and hauled heavy sacks of hemp, cotton, apples, and hope, time and again, down to the plains and the cities. This isn't just a mode of transport—it's the flow of memory itself. I sit by the window, the glass beside me long since clouded over; a scrape of my fingernail peels away a layer of frost-like condensation. As the train pulls away, what flashes past the window is the dilapidated fringe of a city—half-finished buildings, abandoned factory zones, rust-streaked water towers—like scars the city can't hide, brushed past lightly by this train, then quietly erased.

      The scenery outside recedes, inch by inch, while one silver-white bullet train after another roars past in the distance—clean, swift, like a streak of light slicing across the sky. That is the symbol of this era's other direction: speed, efficiency, technology, carrying the hopes of a different kind of people. Meanwhile, our green train chugs along on its diesel engine, swaying through the Gobi and the hills, following tracks that most have forgotten.

      This train is in no hurry, and it doesn't care about cost. It simply stubbornly follows its own track, like a sliver of afterglow in the cracks of an era, illuminating those who still live their lives in silence—and also illuminating the young couple sitting by the window. They are watching the scenery outside, and the scenery is watching them. They may not know the weight on their own shoulders, but in this moment, their silence has already answered for the future.

      The sky outside gradually darkens, and the western dusk paints the world in a muted gray-orange. In the distance, mountain ridges stretch on, like an old man of the earth crouching in silence, watching this old train pass through. It doesn't clamor, doesn't dazzle, yet it lingers like the coda of a history, drawn out slowly, echoing low in the wind.

      I rode such a train in the northwest, in memory of the old Chengdu–Kunming Railway—a line built by the hands of the southwestern people many years ago, but now abandoned.