Two More Stories: Railroad Crossings & Machinery

Railroad Crossings

by Felix Graff

Once there was a railroad crossing. It was so old that the crossing guards never went down, because no one ever cleaned the rust off the gears. And when a train went through, a car was driving and he couldn’t see the lights flashing and he couldn’t hear the bell ringing because he had his music up way too loud and he was looking around out the window and didn’t see any lights flashing. And he went through the crossing and he saw the train so he stepped on his gas pedal super fast—so he just made it across. The train engineer stopped just in time.

Then he went through another crossing. It was so old the lights couldn’t flash, the guard couldn’t go down and the bell couldn’t ring. And there was just an extra crossing guard that never got rust on its gears. It was built so well it never got rust. And those guards went down and it warned the car. And the car stopped in time. And when it was about to almost go through an open bridge, it slammed windshield first into the guard. And do you know what happened? The guard broke down, falling across the street, making tire after tire go flat. And then, finally, when another tire went flat, some workers came, and they picked up the crossing guard and they put it in the dump because it was just like so old. And then they put another crossing guard in, and that one, the same thing happened with that very car again! So they had to fix it. And then it never happened—almost never—only it happened one time, again, with another car. Actually, it was a bulldozer that crashed. And guess what? Its bucket that pushed things broke off. And it bounced over the fence and it fell into the water and sank. And it never got a new bucket again, so it had to stay in the scrap yard.

Machinery

Once there was a garage door machine and it was old so whenever it opened it only went four inches up, and the opening place was sixteen feet up. Then the car could never get into the garage because the door kept going lower and lower and soon it got so low it touched the ground. The garage door on every wheel was an eyeball. Then there was a wheel and it didn’t have an eyeball because all the eyeballs were black. But the other garage door never stopped working so he backed up into the street and used that garage door. The garage door was 9 years old.