The Phosphate Train Keeps a Schedule Nobody Publishes

Freight railways are the least observed infrastructure there is, which is odd, because they are the most predictable thing in most people's day.

Nobody along this stretch has a timetable. Everybody has an expectation, and the expectation is accurate to about twenty minutes, which is better than several published timetables in several wealthier countries.

The knowledge is transmitted the way this kind of knowledge always is — by people who need to cross the line, people who graze animals near it, and children, who are the most reliable source and the least willing to explain how they know.

An unpublished schedule is still a schedule. It is just held by the people who have to live next to it.

What the train carries is phosphate, which is a commodity with no romance attached to it whatsoever, and which is one of the small number of things that has moved along this route more or less continuously through everything.