Dear Pilot,
People – my guides were quite delighted to inform me – aren’t born knowing anything at all! It’s why they have schools and museums. I suppose that makes some sense. Locomotives are built all at once so we mostly know what to do as soon as we leave the shops, but for people it’s a process that takes years. There’s even an exhibit about it inside! They don’t have a postcard of it to show us (they say it doesn’t make for a pretty photo to send in the mail) but the exhibit shows that people start out so small that you can hardly see them at all and then they get bigger over time. At first, they can only cry and eat and sleep, but they start learning things like how to walk and talk very quickly. When they get big enough, they go to school and learn how to do science fair projects and write letters. Then the schools bring them here to learn about how they were once too small to know anything, haha!
U-505 and I do talk quietly to each other on our days off. Ours is the same as any yard, where we talk about the same things over and over. On Thanksgivings, I always like to ask him what he’s grateful for. I mostly mean it as a joke since U-505 thinks he’s been rather unlucky (I disagree). Thanksgiving is an American holiday so he always tries to argue with me that it’s not any German machine’s place to intrude on our celebrations. I think he is really just avoiding the question. With enough goading though, he usually will admit to being grateful for “American hospitality”, which I suspect is him joking back even if he says it with total seriousness.
On our Christmas days off, I ask U-505 to tell his Christmas story. He just has the one because he was only in service for two years and he was in dock over his first Christmas because he was being repaired after that airplane attack. It’s a funny thing though. U-505’s very proud of the story, but it’s also a little embarrassing so he’ll only tell it if he thinks 2903 isn’t listening. I can only ask him to tell it on Christmas then.
The guides say that you and I are both products of the Great Depression and this is why we are more given to appreciate our lot in life and even the lots of others. U-505 and 2903 are both wartime builds and maybe that is why they do not get along.
415 sounds like a very dedicated, hard worker. I imagine all of your engines in operating condition are determined to give your visitors a solid ride. I always kept an ear out for complaints about heat from cars though. If cars are hot, the passengers probably are too. They’d be used to having air conditioning now so they’re more sensitive to heat. Has there been any progress on repairing your cars’ air conditioning? My guides say that stainless steel reflects the sun’s rays, rather than absorbing it like dark paint would, so they should be cooler than a lot of other stock in your yard.
Maybe we come out of the shop knowing how to do our jobs, but we’re still learning new things all the time, aren’t we? And it’s another thing to be grateful for! I don’t think it’s too terribly hot yet, so it must be working like they say. We also get nice breezes in from across the lake too.
2903 and 999 are agreeing loudly about their paint absorbing sunlight, but they don’t mind. It’s nothing to a hot firebox. U-505 mentioned to me that he was painted all black once for his war bond tour, but he says now that he was also still in the water then so he doesn’t know if it makes much of a difference for boats.
“If it did,” he says, “it was less than three inches.”
Everyone is being so agreeable about it. It might not be too hot to argue there, but maybe it is here!
Your friend,
Pioneer