Say, when taking a train, everyone's eyes are often chasing the scenery outside the window, or staring at the mobile phone screen. But I'm a bit of a freak, always staring at my feet - or rather, at the silent black stripes below the tracks.

They're sleepers.

These guys, lying there motionless, hold up hundreds of tons of steel dragons and let them whine past. This is very interesting, you think carefully, is it not the typical "I am responsible for being as stable as Mount Tai, and you are responsible for being fast"?

The "counterattack" of pine

If we say that the raw material of this sleeper is actually quite grounded, it is our common pine wood. The leftover materials from your house decoration may be this stuff. Pine wood looks soft and smells of pine. It may not be the top match in the furniture industry, but in the railway industry, it is an absolute "model worker".

Why choose it? In addition to being straight and easy to process, the key lies in its own "little temper" - turpentine. This thing is a biological weapon to fungi and bugs. But this "small temper" in front of nature, to tell the truth, is a bit inadequate. No matter how hard the bones are, they will be crispy.

Therefore, if pine trees want to change from "fast-growing forests" to "railway guards", it is not enough to rely on natural beauty alone, and they must go to factories for "further education".

Remodeling under "high pressure"

This process of further education is, in a nutshell, an "oil bath". But this is not to throw the wood into a frying pan and fry it until it is burnt outside and tender inside. That is called fried dough sticks, not sleepers.

The real process is a "soul torture" at the wood cell level. The workers stuffed the selected pine wood into a huge sealed tank, started with a "vacuum suction", followed by an injection of creosote to inundate the sleepers. Here comes the big deal – pressure. The enormous pressure is like a pair of invisible iron fists, which force the preservative oil into the bone marrow of the wood.

There is a hard index here, which is also the key to decide whether it can take up its post: the oil immersion depth, and the oil immersion depth of qualified anti-corrosion sleepers can often reach more than 13 mm.

This 13 mm is the "lifeline" of the sleeper. It means that the preservative oil is no longer a "decoration" floating on the surface, but a part of the timber. Even if the surface is worn, the "core" inside is still a wall of iron.

Silent "Sea Immortal Needles"

After all these twists and turns, the pine tree is reborn.

Now it exudes an "industrial smell" that makes insects and ants give way. Termites trying to settle down in sleepers will probably scold the street with a bewildered face: "What's that smell? Poisonous!" and then run away.

What does this "hard core" protection mean for a speeding train?

You know, if the sleepers don't hold, they're soaked in rain, or they're eaten empty by bugs, the tracks are dancing in the mud. When a train runs, it is not "lightning fast", it is "soul stirring". Even the slightest drop or deviation of the orbit at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour is a fatal hazard.

It is precisely because of these sleepers, which are "armed" to a depth of 13 mm, that they dare to lift the rails steadily for decades. With their own flexibility and firmness, they have resolved every shock and impact caused by the train.

They are the "silent majority" on the railway. They cannot go anywhere by themselves, but they do their best to deliver everyone who yearns for a distance to their destination steadily. This is really moving, isn't it