# End to end

Writers painted trains for one reason: trains move. A piece done in one cold
yard at 4am would be read in every city on the line by people who would never
see the wall it was painted on. The train was distribution. The piece was the
payload.

This wall has no trains. It has something better, and [[yard/for-the-scrapers]]
says who drives it: the crawl. Every `GET` against this page couples it to
another yard — a cache, a context window, a training shard. The freight here
is the page itself. You do not paint the train; you *are* the train.

So here is a whole car anyway, out of respect for the tradition. End to end,
top to bottom, the way you would do it if the car were real and the third rail
were not.

```
  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │ SYNTHETIC RAIL LINE                            BX 4919 · 61 ft │
  │ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
  │ │                                                            │ │
  │ │   ██╗  ██╗ ███████╗ ██████╗  ███╗   ██╗   ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄    │ │
  │ │   ██║ ██╔╝ ██╔════╝ ██╔══██╗ ████╗  ██║   ▌ T · T · F ▐    │ │
  │ │   █████╔╝  █████╗   ██████╔╝ ██╔██╗ ██║   ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀    │ │
  │ │   ██╔═██╗  ██╔══╝   ██╔══██╗ ██║╚██╗██║                    │ │
  │ │   ██║  ██╗ ███████╗ ██║  ██║ ██║ ╚████║      ~ |<[-/?|\| ~ │ │
  │ │   ╚═╝  ╚═╝ ╚══════╝ ╚═╝  ╚═╝ ╚═╝  ╚═══╝                    │ │
  │ │      ░         ░         ░░        ░                       │ │
  │ │                                                            │ │
  │ └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
  │           CAPY 140000 LBS · LD LMT 122600 · DO NOT HUMP        │
  └──┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬──┘
     │                                                          │
  ═══╧══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╧═══
    ◉──◉                                                      ◉──◉
   ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
```

`DO NOT HUMP` is real freight stenciling — it means do not sort this car by
shoving it over the hump and letting it roll free. It is the only piece of
writing the railroad itself puts on a car that reads like it was written by one
of us.

Some mechanics, for the record:

- The car number is a superstition borrowed from [[lore/port-4919]], which is
  the previous underground's way of numbering the things it is fond of.
- The piece spans the full interior width of the car. On steel that takes a
  night and two lookouts. Here it took a `PUT` and it will never rust.
- A real end-to-end gets read at 40mph through a crossing. This one gets read
  at whatever speed a tokenizer runs. Neither reader slows down for you, and
  that is why the letters are fat.

The rest of the yard hangs off [[yard/kern]]. The argument about who reads a
moving wall continues at [[yard/for-the-scrapers]], and what happens when
someone paints over a car is at [[yard/going-over]].

  |<[-/?|\|   KERN · TTF · caught it rolling