The pillow is very silent.
It carries two steel rails on top, on which hundreds or thousands of tons of trains are rolled day after day, day and night without rest. Rainwater pours on it, the sun shines on it, ants gnaw on it, and wild grass arches out from under it, scolding it for blocking the sunlight. It remained silent, without even a chance to turn over. Railway workers passing by occasionally kick it and mutter, 'This one is okay,' which is the highest affirmation of its career.
But it was precisely this piece of wood that supported the backbone of the entire railway era.
Making sleepers is not a task that can be easily accomplished by cutting down a tree. Railway engineers tried various types of wood in their early years and finally turned their attention to pine wood. The reason is simple: pine wood has a straight nature, long fibers, and smooth texture, unlike some hardwoods that easily explode for you to see. Moreover, pine wood naturally contains pine resin, causing insects to furrow their brows and fungi to take a detour. Of course, relying solely on this skill brought out of the womb is far from enough to cope with decades of feng shui and rain in the wilderness. So humans came up with a cruel trick for it - oil immersion.
The first step in making sleepers is to cut pine wood into standard plain sleepers. The formed plain sleepers will be stacked into ventilated stacks, and after a period of drying to remove excess moisture, they can proceed to the next process.
The next process is not so much a nightmare for wood as its rebirth. Hot anti-corrosive oil is forcefully injected under high pressure, from the ends, sides, and scratches of the wood, driving straight through all possible gaps. It is not necessary to investigate in detail how long this process lasts, but there is a number worth mentioning - the depth of oil penetration often reaches thirteen millimeters or more. What is the concept of thirteen millimeters? That is the thickness of despair that any insect or ant that dares to bite, the depth that rainwater repeatedly washes away for a whole year cannot dig out.
This fuss is about three things.
One is moisture-proof. Wood decay is most likely related to water. Rainwater seeps in, and microorganisms settle in, gnawing on cellulose as food with relish. After oil immersion, most of the interior space of the wood is occupied by anti-corrosion oil, making it difficult for water molecules to squeeze in and microorganisms to even touch the door.
The second is insect prevention. Termites walk horizontally on ordinary wood, but when they encounter oil soaked sleepers, it feels like they hit the south wall. It's not because of the strong taste, it's because the layer of wood rich in anti-corrosion ingredients is not their recipe at all. Hard biting is acceptable, the consequences are at your own risk.
The third is resistance to deformation. Wood will expand and contract repeatedly with changes in humidity in the natural environment, and over time it will crack and warp. After the oil is filled into the fibers, it is like putting a shaped underwear on the wood, greatly buffering the internal stress caused by repeated tossing and turning, allowing it to lie on the gravel roadbed obediently for ten, twenty, thirty years.
It is not as brittle and hard as concrete sleepers, it has some elasticity, and when a train passes over it, it can absorb some of the impact force for the steel rails. It's not as noisy as steel, it can suppress the roar of the wheels to some extent. The most crucial thing is that in an era when industrial capacity was not yet luxurious, it was almost the most economical choice - transporting pine trees from all over the mountains, feeding them with oil, and placing them on the roadbed could carry one train after another loaded with coal and grain.
Nowadays, these dark figures can no longer be seen on most railways, replaced by reinforced concrete sleepers under the steel rails. But on those branch railways and dedicated lines, on those lines where trains still sway slowly through the fields, oil immersed sleepers are still there. It lay there, silent, carrying the rails and counting the wheels.
