Write, Improve your Skills, Relax! join - A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

A big, old-fashioned train painted weathered red and cream beads along a quiet overgrown railway line. In the background are thick and dense trees that form a kind of hug over this scene. The tracks are overgrown in places, and controlled by grassy roots as if to say they have hardly been used. The lights of the train are on as it gives a faint glimmer while white smoke surrounds an engine based just above its tracks. A locomotive approaches with two figures visible in the drivers cabin directing it forwards.

Poem:

Up from the past creeps a train,
At last it moves along the quiet racks,
And the murky woods, so dark and wide,
Only history to guide.

The rails are dull, high are the grass;
It takes its breaths of earth, breeze and sky
And every curve is memory written in steel.
An era dead and buried, but still today both absolutely true and around.

The engine it hums, with the smoke doth rise,
As echoes from forgotten skies,
And it leans into the curve,
But I wonder where it stops.

Story:

A train which boomed and shook/clattering hone(?) along the tracks, had been the envy of the valley, ferrying people around/with news, goods and outside world bustle. However, those days were long over. And it ran–it was still run–but every Saturday, and the tracks on which it moved were gaunt now; a skeletal carriage full mostly of dust and remembrances.

This day however was a bit different. When we left the station and rolled through those trees we knew the area was listening. Maybe it was the way leaves half whispered to him as he passed or maybe it was because of the mist that hung so low over the tracks, and had been since mid-October began, but he felt… old Jim had been with this same train for pushing thirty years, give/take, after all. He looked at his younger conductor, who was too lost in the moving rhythm of the wheels to notice it.

The train rumbled ahead, its tracks wailed and pulled them into the wilderness of what had been.

Much appreciation to @freewritehouse for organizing this contest.