The Line

On the western railway line between Amstetten and Wels there are a few stops that hardly anyone knows today, because the express trains pass through and only the regional train stops, and one of these places is called Blindenmarkt, which was always a peculiar name, and I passed through there well over a thousand times without ever getting off. What I saw was always the same: a small platform, a waiting shelter that was once yellow and had turned grey at some point, sometimes a bicycle someone had locked up, sometimes nobody. That sounds bleak but it wasn't, or I never felt it that way. These small places existed without anyone paying attention to them, and that impressed me in a way I can't easily explain.

What occupies me more are the things that are gone. In Wels until the nineties there was a large goods loading facility on the western side of the station, machinery was loaded there, sometimes cars on long flat wagons, and when you passed through at night the whole site was lit up with strong floodlights. At some point it was gone, first the operation, then the lights, then they demolished the buildings, and now there's just nothing there. I never understood why that bothers me. My wife Gerda once said I attach myself to things more than to people, she didn't mean it unkindly, I think she was right, and I think she also knew that I was attached to her all the same, more than to anything else.

Read in the app, leave a resonance, discover more stories.