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The observation car delighted those who could afford access to it, and over the years it had attained an almost mythical status.

It was even rumored that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, riding the Phoenix to a Chicago movie premiere in 1940, became so enamored with the observation car that they asked to spend the night there.

Because of its popularity, Judd assumes the observation car will be the place to spot a fellow passenger. But when he peeks inside, he sees that it, too, is empty.

Odd.

And, Judd has to admit, more than a little unnerving.

Through the observation car’s yawning windows, he sees the outskirts of the city.

Dingy one-story homes, empty factories with broken windows, crooked fences with gaps in the pickets.

He’d grown up in a place just like this, his family crammed into a shotgun shack so close to the tracks that the whole house shook when a train rumbled past. As a boy, he stared out the window as they went by, marveling at how those iron behemoths could be propelled over a set of rails by something as simple as steam and human ingenuity.

He wondered about the men who made it happen.

He wondered what it felt like to harness such power.

Judd eventually learned, building and tinkering first in his backyard, then in a garage when his family moved to a slightly bigger house.

His education continued at a series of factories similar to the ones zipping by the observation car in decrepit streaks.

Despite never having gone to college, he was a smart young man.

A quick learner, too, and not just about train engines.

He was a whiz at chemistry, math, even magic, using his long, narrow fingers to perform sleights of hand that amazed his co-workers.

Ultimately, he got a job at the Union Atlantic Railroad, doing well enough to catch the eye of its owner, Arthur Matheson.

The two hit it off immediately. They were, Judd liked to think, cut from the same cloth. Just two big kids playing with the ultimate model train, eager to make it bigger, faster, stronger. Not to mention sleeker.

“I want a train that looks and moves like liquid mercury,” Art told Judd one day over lunch. “Think you can make that happen?”

“Yeah,” Judd replied. “I think I can.”

And he did.

That, Judd realizes now, is when the trouble began, ultimately leading him to do the unthinkable. Even now, he can’t quite believe he played a key role in something so horrible. Nor can he shake the feeling this train ride is all about paying the price for his past sins.

As he stands in the empty observation car he helped design, Judd longs to be anywhere but here. He wants to be sitting in coach, enjoying the comfort of strangers, knowing they have no idea what he’s done—or what he’s capable of.

He leaves the observation car, gripped by a feeling of apprehension he can’t shake no matter how much he tries.

Moving through the narrow hallways of the first-class section, Judd notes how the Phoenix’s interior has grown shabby since he’d last been onboard.

In addition to the buzzing wall sconce, he spots tears in the upholstery and a threadbare streak in the blue carpet where hundreds of passengers have trod.

Maybe that explains the noticeable lack of riders.

Word has gotten out that the vaunted Philadelphia Phoenix is now a shell of its former self.

More likely, the sparse ridership is the result of changes taking place outside the formerly grand train.

Interstate highways have spread like ooze across the country, choking a once-pristine landscape with traffic.

Meanwhile, the sky is quickly filling with planes.

If a major city doesn’t yet have an air terminal, it will soon.

With options like that, no wonder few people choose to ride by rail.

Yet Judd sees no one as he rushes toward the front of the train. Each car he traverses contains the ghostly chill of something recently abandoned.

In the first-class lounge, the bartender is nowhere to be found.

In the dining car, there’s nary a waiter around, even though all the tables are set for passengers who haven’t yet materialized.

In the galley, pots sit on cold stovetops and knives glisten from racks on the wall. His footfalls rise from the tiled floor, echoing off the appliances, impossibly loud. When Judd accidentally elbows the handle of a pan, sending it clattering to the floor, it sounds like a gunshot.

The eerie emptiness continues into the coach quarters. The club car’s tables are bare, its banquette seats empty. Coffee cups sit neatly stacked next to a silver samovar on the counter, with no one behind it to fill them.

And so it goes with each car he enters. In the coach lounge, issues of that day’s late edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer lie neatly fanned out across end tables, untouched.

In the sleeper and coach cars, every seat is vacant.

No one dozes in their chairs. Or gazes out their windows.

Or shuffles to the lavatories in the back of each car.

As Judd moves through them, his worry hardens into outright fear.

Every single person he saw earlier—from conductors to porters to passengers—is now gone, leaving the Philadelphia Phoenix completely empty.