There are no more trains today…

 There are no more trains today, the officious railway women told me, with their 1950s style spectacles moving on their noses like trackside signals. It was indeed the 1950s for real. But no possible style could really represent such a black-and-white era, although I lived through it all, and it was full of colour. Meanwhile, a rather altered view of the time intervened, because the war had not ended in 1945 but extended right up to 1963 and women were still doing men’s jobs throughout, and then long into the future,  as most men never returned, except the men like me who never went away in the first place.  There were not many of us, and they were sidelined into their own sidings late at night when the blackout still meant that the red and green stop and go stayed blind to movement as well any shunting manoeuvres. The men had in fact become the trains with cute faces upfront, like those of Thomas the Tank Engine and other similar trains with masculine names. I was driven by a lady called Marigold who could stoke coal to save Britain, and hissed out steam as if there were no tomorrows that would one day ban coal itself for fear of the climate changing as well as history. Indeed, history laid out its own maverick plans of social habits and manners and things that were allowed and things that were not allowed. Television  was banned at outset, snuffed in  the bud, as its bad effects were recognised upfront and there was no coronation to broadcast for reasons it’s beyond the story to tell. Nobody predicted the Internet because there was no Internet to predict. And women made do and mended with women, and the few remaining men simply worked their socks off hauling things through tunnels. Luckily, things lighter than coal, but with no light at the metaphorical end where the tunnel was supposed to end. Time was its own tunnel and gradually all trains vanished into them. I, for one, never came out of them again. And over population and bad housing remained a problem because nobody like me as reliable narrator was allowed to deal with it or even know about it.  And nobody had predicted the fertile passions of the things that came  into humanity’s personal space from their own, but everyone lived happily in the utopia because there would ever be no more trains today, as replacement busts and bosoms sufficed. Yes, I saw through it all, the only one left to live on a dark empty siding, tapping  away at a screen that shone like a smouldering coal fire behind glass reflecting my tank engine of a face, and I adjusted my spectacles upon my nose, sometimes flying off on their adjustable wings that long went out of fashion, even as a facial decoration. What with all colours eventually merging as one, and artificial intelligence not intelligent enough as a predictive force to see it would destroy itself instead of humanity. Ah yes, I know there were still  the ghostly sounds of shapes shunting where all tunnels merge as one, too, so becoming the ultimate old-fashioned male-merge that computers and their spreadsheets would have allowed had they not gone off to their own endless war before computers were even invented. I am sure there was a better ending, had it been left to me.