Romania - Msts

"Pită, Andrei?" shouted Măria, the conductor’s wife, shoving a loaf of warm bread through the cab window. "You can’t drive on holy water alone."

The Cailor Tunnel was 980 meters of absolute darkness bored through living rock. As the locomotive swallowed the light, Andrei did what his father had taught him: he turned off the single bulb in the cab. For thirty seconds, MSTS Romania vanished from the world.

Inside the three wooden carriages, the world had slipped sideways. In the first car, a group of teenagers dressed as iele —the ghostly fairies of Romanian folklore—used their phone lights to cast eerie shadows on the wood-paneled ceiling. In the second, an old man in a sheepskin hat was tuning a cimpoi (bagpipe). In the third, a bride—fleeing her own wedding in Vatra Moldoviței because she’d seen her groom kiss the maid of honor—sat crying into a handkerchief embroidered with the word Vis (Dream).

He handed the bride a wildflower. She took it. msts romania

Then came the tunnel.

The rain over the Carpathian foothills had turned the narrow-gauge tracks of the Mocănița into twin rivers of rust and mud. Andrei, a driver for the CFF (Romanian State Railway) for thirty years, watched the water bead on the brass of his pressure gauge. The locomotive, a veteran Resicza from 1952, breathed steam into the cold air like an old dragon dreaming of fire.

Today was the "Train of the Witches," a Halloween-themed run from Câmpulung Moldovenesc up to the painted monasteries of the Bucovina region. The carriages were packed. Not with tourists with iPads, but with locals. "Pită, Andrei

Behind them, the locomotive hissed softly, content to have carried, for one more autumn afternoon, the weight of both history and hope.

Inside the carriages, silence fell. No phones glowed. No one whispered. The bride stopped crying. In the blackness, the only thing that existed was the clack-clack-clack of the wheels on the joints and the smell of coal smoke and wet moss.

"Măria!" Andrei shouted down the side of the train. "We need a glass of țuică ! The bride has decided to live!" For thirty seconds, MSTS Romania vanished from the world

As the locomotive drifted to a gentle stop at the wooden platform, steam curling around the wheels, the groom was there. Not the cheating one—a different one. A quiet forester from Gura Humorului who had been watching the Mocănița pass his cabin every Tuesday for seven years, waiting for the right passenger to get off.

Andrei pulled the whistle cord. The sound— uuuuu-huuuuu —rolled through the gorge like a wounded stag. The pistons clanked. The wheels slipped once, bit into the steel, and they were moving.