Читать книгу Cheerful locomotive Chu-Chukhin and his friends. Good fairy tales with fantasy elements - - Страница 8

Alena’s grandparents lived in a railway house. That house stood somewhere on the route between Poltava and Kiev, exactly not far from the Enchanted Forest, the Marsh Swamps, the Swamp of Old Steam Locomotives and an abandoned depot. They were separated from this mysterious place by an old railway bridge and a wide river, through which local residents were afraid to cross, fearing those places and their inhabitants.

The house stood right next to the railway tracks, but in order to get to it from Poltava, and it was from there, from Poltava, that Alenka was traveling to visit her grandparents, she had to get off at one of the nameless stops, called “stop number so-and-so,” walk through the field for five kilometers and only after that get off at the desired railway track. And then, along this canvas, we walked for some more time and already there stood the house of my grandparents.

The train that carried Alenka that day traveled according to the schedule and its route. Alenka wondered why the train didn’t turn right next to the dense forest in order to pass not only past her grandparents’ house, but also take a significant shortcut. The fact is that the road she always took was quite a detour.

Surprised by this circumstance once again, Alenka decided to get off just one stop earlier. She took a map with her and judging by it, she only had to walk a couple of kilometers along the railway tracks through the forest, turn left, then cross the very bridge on which Kolobchuk ran away from them at one time, and then to the house of her grandmother and Grandfather is just a stone’s throw away. So, it seemed to her that she would have been with her grandparents much earlier, and it was much more pleasant to walk in the forest shade during the summer heat than to break through the field grasses, which that year grew taller than a man. At least taller than Alenka.

Having made this decision, Alenka jumped off the train at the stop and looked around. She didn’t notice anyone and confidently walked along the already fairly rusty railway line running into the forest. That branch branched off from the main highway and few people traveled along it, except perhaps those strange little trains that had recently settled in the forest, and even then it was unlikely.

Grandfather, who had worked on the railroad for many years, strictly forbade Alenka from even approaching the engines, much less communicating. He was sure that something was not clean here, because, in his opinion, locomotives themselves could not live. Grandfather was upset by the unauthorized rolling of steam locomotives, which violated the strict schedule of movement of rolling stock, to which grandfather was already accustomed. And in general, what fell outside the norms of the railway communication system, he saw as a gross violation of all possible norms and rules.