Uncle Herbert! It was so good to see him! They’d only just met him today, but it felt like seeing an old friend. He was carrying a clipboard and wearing a dorky conductor’s hat and a bright yellow parka to match his yellow suit.

He stopped and looked up at them.

“Kate. Tom. Good to see you. You made it this far.”

“Uncle Herbert!”

“Uncle Herbert!” Tom said. “We went through the woods and didn’t crash and then we saw a station and it was full of animals and they talked and then the train talked!”

Tom said this as one long continuous word. Uncle Herbert didn’t look particularly surprised at any of it.

“How did you get here ahead of us?” Kate said.

“More magic,” Uncle Herbert said. “Listen, this is all a huge mistake. None of it was supposed to happen, or not yet at least. The train left much too soon. Maybe it had to, maybe it couldn’t wait, I don’t know, but I don’t like it. We’ll be lucky if we don’t all end up in the Roundhouse.

“But it’s too late, you can’t go back, so you’ll just have to go forward and do your best. You’ve got a schedule to keep to now.”

“Wait—we do?” Kate said.

“We need to put together a train for you right away. Fortunately, no one’s come through here for years, so they’ve got just about everything in stock. What cars do you want?”

“Cars? You mean like train cars?”

“Yes.”

“You’re really going to just give us a bunch of train cars.”

As with overly round numbers, experience had taught Kate to be suspicious of people offering her free stuff.

“I gave you a steam engine, didn’t I?”

“Um. Okay, what are the choices?”

“It doesn’t work like that. This isn’t a restaurant, you’re not ordering off a menu. It’s your train—you have to make it up.”

Kate and Tom glanced at each other.

“May I suggest,” Uncle Herbert said delicately, “that you begin with some passenger cars?”

He did actually sound kind of like a waiter at a fancy restaurant.

“Sure,” Kate said. “Sounds good.”

“Yeah,” said Tom.

“Two passenger cars?”

“Great,” Kate said. “Two passenger cars.”

“Excellent. What else?”

What other kinds of train cars were there? Her mind went completely blank. She really was not one of those kids who was super into trains.

“A… dining car?”

“Dining car. Good.” Uncle Herbert wrote it down on his clipboard.

Kate couldn’t think of anything else. “Tom, you pick something.”

“Uh. We could have two dining cars?”

“What’s the point of that?”

“Like two different restaurants. If we got bored of one, we could go to the other.”

Kate thought that was ridiculous, but Uncle Herbert wrote it down, too.

“Second… dining… car. Good. Need a kitchen car to go with it.”