A ride on a train

Good evening stranger. Sure, come on in and sit down.....it's a mostly free world and I always welcome a little company on long journeys. Especially at night like this....

What, oh...a newcomer eh. You are certainly to be made welcome then....you're lucky, only a few of us know of the rift and potential.

I can see you are full of questions so let me begin with a statement.....You have been fed up with your "modern" and out of control world......ah, yes I thought so.....had a bad day and went to sleep thinking of how the world used to be better? Right again, no, just a lucky guess on my part...because I am like you.....to quote an old novel that hasn't been written yet...I too was a stranger in a strange land. I've decided to stay here, pretty much full time now...the choice will be yours also....

But, I'm getting ahead of myself...first a little background on this ...hmm...alternate universe if you will.

Here, we are different yet in many ways the same as the world you left behind.

Some background on what you will see in the next few hours....we're on the Sunrise Special.....for some reason all newcomers, come in on this train. It's running from Chicago to Washington City in the District of Victoria. Don't laugh, it's quite simple and very complicated......ok, now you can laugh.....

The United States is a fully independent country, England granted us our Independence in 1820. No, there was a rebellion that started in the late 1700's but, some of the wiser men in the Colonies got together in Metropolis.....what, oh, about where your Philadelphia is now......south of New York, but north of Washington City.....

Anyway, these men, led by Sir Benjamin Franklin and Mr. Jefferson put together a proposal to the King of England that would avoid any more unseemly bloodshed and still give us a level of Independence that would be increasing over the next few decades.

They enlisted young George Washington to lead a small and select delegation to visit King George and make their proposal....timing was everything for this....and thanks to the Great God Almighty we had that timing. George was quite rational and even more importantly, some of his advisers were not in London at the time.....how that happened is a tale that would take several volumes to tell, and quite frankly alot of the story still very hush hush, even after 2 centuries.

George (the King that is) granted us our request to have our own Parliament and to impose our own taxes, both for us and for him. In exchange we stayed full Independence for a period of 30 to 50 years......worked out wonderfully for both sides.

Now the world you are in is undoubtedly a great deal different than the one you left....if I may inquire what year did you go to sleep in?

Oh my goodness 2008, my time has really flown. Myself, I took a nap one afternoon in the spring of 1911. Oh I've been home several times....after all it is 1940 now, and one does want to catch up on old friends. That's no problem, ask away.

First of all, in your jacket pocket there should be an envelope with the railway's logo upon it. Yes that's it.. The Royal Continental Rly. Inside are two tickets....one that the conductor will punch in about an hour or so, and another....yes, the green one....that's an open date ticket...you can go home...er back to the future, (that has a nice ring to it, eh what?)....if you spend the next year here, you will find that when you go back.....time has only passed you by at the rate of maybe two or three seconds per day lived here...you will wake up, having lived a full year here, and been in your bed at home for only a half hour or so! Oh, and when you wake up back home, there will probably be a return ticket to here in your pocket....that is if you' behaved yourself....somehow really bad people who try to act out their darker impulses never come back....alive. Which is quite fine for me.....we have enough baddies here... that we've raised ourselves.

Well, you will find that the here and now is quite different... I've got a dear friend who came over from 1994 and was amazed at the differences and similarities.

But I can see the strain of transfer is weighing on you, why don't you take a nap and I'll cover more of the day to day life in an hour or so....