Author's Notes: First, Arthur belongs to Marc Brown, not me, I'm just a fan who appreciates Arthur's existence and thank Marc Brown for bringing him to life (not literally) and allowing him to become a T.V. show. I'm also writing this fanfic because I don't spend a lot of time writing fanfiction like I used to, I've been rusty, kind sort of still am, haven't had a lot of time, or was busy with other things, like Deviant Art and I've been tired a lot and haven't been feeling up to much. I'm also writing because the Arthur fandom seems to be in bad shape and somebody needs to get this fandom back on its feet. And I hope I can come back and make more and more fanfics whether about railroad crossings, or whatever, and try to finish my fanfic about George, which still needs more chapters. I also have some writer's block.
I will warn you that though this is a clean story, it may not be that good of a story, in fact it's not going to be one of my best stories and I don't expect many of you to like it. I'm just making it up as I go along, but hopefully I'll put my heart into this and make it readable. This story may need some editing so I am open to some constructive criticism. And also, I'll try to write about other things than railroad crossings and fire alarms. Please bare with me though, I'm not one of the smartest people on earth and my interests are limited.
But I want to help get the Arthur fandom back on its feet. I'll probably fail. Anyway, enough feeling sorry for myself and rambling, let's just cut right to the story.
Story
So I'm sitting in the middle backseat of a car riding down a city street and I'm quiet for the most part. Up in the driver's seat is Buster Baxter, who, despite his silly personality, is a really good driver. I don't know how he's able to do so but he seems to know what he's doing and seems to be trustable behind the wheel. His younger and best friend Arthur is sitting next to him in the front passenger seat. It's a cold cloudy day outside.
As I'm sitting in the back, being quiet, and looking through the wind shield and out the side windows, I hear Arthur and Buster having a conversation with each other.
Arthur says, "Francine and I had a very hard time deciding what we should do on our date."
"No kidding," replies Buster.
"I mean we couldn't decide if we did dinner and then a movie or a movie and then dinner."
"Couldn't you guys do both at the same time?" asks Buster.
"What do you mean?" asks Arthur.
"You do know movie theaters have a snack bar," says Buster, "and they do sell hotdogs. I have hotdogs for dinner sometimes."
"Well yeah," says Arthur, "so do I. But I was hoping for a more restaurant style dinner, like Apple Bees, or Red Lobster, or Olive Garden, or maybe Claim Jumper or the Texas Roadhouse. You know?"
"Yeah," says Buster.
"I mean you're right, Buster" says Arthur, "we could have did dinner and a movie at the same time, maybe I'll do that with Francine someday."
"You mean 'some night,'" says Buster.
"Okay, sure," says Arthur, "some night."
Arthur was probably a bit annoyed by what Buster had just said but he didn't say anything about that and I couldn't see any expression on his face. Arthur and Buster are looking more at the road than at each other, and Buster's supposed to anyway or else he'll get himself and us into an accident. Thankfully Buster is a responsible driver and believe it or not, he drives better than Arthur! I mean Arthur can drive, but Buster's better at it.
"Sometimes I do that with Sue Ellen," says Buster, "sometimes we have dinner while at the movies, having hotdogs and nachos."
"Hotdogs," I quickly say, butting into Arthur and Buster's conversation, "Ugh."
"You don't like hotdogs, William?" asks Buster.
"Oh, sorry," I say, "I didn't mean to interrupt yous guys' conversation. I can wait."
"No, no," says Buster, "that's all right."
"Yeah," says Arthur, turning to me, "don't you like hotdogs?"
Now that the conversation is open to me, I answer, "Well, I kind of sort of like hotdogs. They're just not my favorite thing to eat, I prefer hamburgers over hotdogs. "
"You do?" asks Buster.
"Yeah," I answer. In fact I prefer almost any meat or entrée to hotdogs, like chicken, pork chops, ribs perhaps, although I like bone-out ribs, I'm not so crazy about bone-in ribs. However, I would eat a hotdog if it had chili, ketchup, mustard, and relish on it."
"You'd eat that?" asks Arthur. "A hotdog with chili, ketchup, mustard, and relish?"
"Yeah," I say, "I like it like that. My aunt did that."
"The mustard part I can understand," says Arthur, but I never actually thought of putting ketchup on a chili dog. Or relish."
"That sounds like a good thing to try," says Buster. "Thanks, William, I'm going to try a chili dog with ketchup, mustard, and relish on it."
"It's very good!" I say. "At least I say it is, and I think you should try it."
"Uh," says Arthur, "I'm not quite sure I'm ready for that."
"Well, I wasn't all too sure about it myself," I say, until I tried it in second grade when they served chilidogs at my school. I mean I thought I didn't like chilidogs, but that's what they served and so I ate that, and they offered ketchup and so I put some on after remembering my aunt did that months before and turned out to be pretty good. But I wasn't all too big of a fan of chilidogs yet."
"Mm-hmm," says Arthur.
"But what I really like and prefer," I say, "having a chilidog with ketchup, mustard, and relish, with a side of French fries, and a cherry lemonade."
"Okay now you're really whetting my appetite," says Buster. "But that sounds like a really good idea."
"Well," I say, "I'm gonna let yous twos get back to your conversation."
"Okay," says Buster.
"So anyway," says Arthur to Buster, "and as if things weren't hard enough, D.W. calls me asking me some stupid questions."
"I feel for you, buddy," says Buster.
"I was annoyed," says Arthur. "I even told her that we Francine and I were trying to decide what to do for our date, but she wasn't getting that. She didn't even give me advice on what to do, she was only thinking about herself. Oh when is that sister of mine going to grow up and handle her own problems instead of dragging me into them? And others she bothers, including Mom and Dad?"
Buster shrugs.
"At least Kate doesn't give me as much trouble."
"So what did you and Francine end up doing?"
"Well," says Arthur, "Francine decided we should go to Olive Garden and I was down with that. Then we would go to the movies, and she let me decide what we should watch."
"Ah…" answers Buster.
"And next time, I'm picking the restaurant and she picks the movie," says Arthur, "although I had a blast at Olive Garden."
"I love Olive Garden," I say, "I always get the spaghetti and meat sauce when I go there. And I love their salads and garlic breadsticks. I just interrupted you guys again didn't I?"
"No, go on," says Arthur.
"I just wish they hadn't discontinued the strawberry limone cake! That was my favorite dessert there, well the only dessert I liked, I hadn't tried any of their other desserts and I suppose I should, but I wish they'd bring back the strawberry limone cake."
Arthur and Buster don't say anything, they probably don't know what to say.
"Anyway," I say, "let me let you get back to your A and B conversation. Or in this case, 'Arthur and Buster conversation.' Get It?"
About five seconds later Arthur and Buster laugh because Arthur's name starts with A and Buster's name starts with B.
"Good one, William!" says Arthur.
"I agree," says Buster.
(A/N) I just came up with that and not on purpose! If you know what I mean.
Soon, sometime after I let Arthur and Buster get back to their conversation, we are coming up on a railroad crossing protected by two cantilever signals and gates. Then suddenly the bright red signal and gate lights start to flash and the gates go down two seconds after the lights flash, which is a bit unusual because gates normally go down four seconds after the lights flash. We're the first ones at the gate as is someone next to us, driving the same direction. And though the windows are closed due to it being cold, the bells are loud enough to be heard from inside the car.
I look to my left and see another railroad crossing a couple to a few blocks away and I can see its gates down too and the lights on those gates lit up and flashing. That crossing is on a one-way street but ours is on a 2-way street 4-lane street. Then, as my eyes are glued to that crossing, I see the train passing by it. And as the train gets closer to the crossing Arthur, Buster and I are at, we start hearing its horn blow. The train blows one more horn as the three white locomotives with blue strips on them pass through the crossing, carrying nothing but brown boxcars. The train continues to blow its horn as it approaches other crossings along its way.
The train is moving kind of slow as it passes by us, probably like twenty-five to thirty miles per hour. Buster decided to shut the car off to save gas and to keep from idling too long. Likely many others also waiting for this train have done the same thing. Meanwhile I enjoy watching not only as the boxcars are going from our left to our right but really enjoy seeing the signal and gate lights alternately blink, and the third light at the end of the gate solid, and hear the bell rining.
"Enjoying the train, William?" Buster asks.
Arthur and Buster are aware of my love for trains.
"Oh yeah," I answer. "I like even more that the lights are flashing, the gate is down, and that I can hear the bell ringing. And I like this bell sound very much."
"What's so special about the bell?" asks Arthur.
I answer, "This is a General Signals type 1 electronic bell. It's my most favorite crossing bell sound in the world."
"Are there other bell sounds?" asks Buster.
"There are," I answer. What we're hearing is a more modern type bell, one of the modern kinds out there. And the lights at this crossing are L.E.D. lights. The brand of these L.E.D.s are General Electric/Harmon and these are the fading type L.E.D.s."
"Wow," says Arthur, "I didn't know that. I didn't know there were different kinds of bells or lights."
"Yeah," I say, "over the years lights were lit with incandescent bulbs, some still are but now some are L.E.D. They're more efficient as are the electronic bells compared to the older style bells we've been hearing over the last century."
"You sure do know a lot about railroad crossings," says Buster.
"I'm more interested in these things than I am In anything else," I say.
"Well," says Arthur, "you did teach me some things."
"Yeah," says Buster, "me too."
"I do hope you guys don't mind waiting for this train," I say, "I know lots of people don't like it."
"No," says Buster, "I don't mind.
"Yeah," says Arthur, "me neither, although D.W. would. She hates waiting for trains to go by."
"I don't blame her," I say.
The train does pick up a little more speed. After about seven to eight minutes, while I'm looking out the left side window, I see the train is about to finish and after the last car passes the neighboring crossing, I see the gates at that crossing go up and cars start crossing. Then about five seconds after the last car passes the crossing we're at, the bell on our side of the crossing stops ringing and the gate on our side goes up first. The other gate doesn't go up until like a second and a half later. That was kind of strange and unusual, because gates normally go down or go up at the same time but not at this crossing, and I've never seen this crossing in action before so I don't know if that's normal for this crossing or if this crossing malfunctioned. I'd have to come back to this crossing some day to see if it does this again.
After the gate in front of us lifted up enough to let us through, Buster drove underneath the gate while it was still going up. I turned around to finish watching the lights flash. The lights continued to flash even after the gate in front of us stopped moving and until the other gate was all the way back up. Then I turned back around and faced forward.
Arthur and Buster continued conversing with each other and I was again quiet for the most part.
The End
Author's Final Notes (Please Only Read if you're Interested): I thought of this story back in late 2012. Well actually it was just something I fantasized about. This was based on and modeled after a real time in my life I was at a railroad crossing in Gary, Indiana, on Broadway Street if you will. I was with my grandmother, who was driving, and my mother, and my few months old baby sister. There are many crossings in Gary, Indiana, and some streets have more than one crossing and the one we were at, Broadway, was north of 11th Avenue, and somewhere south of where the KFC is. You can find it on Google Maps. There's an old railroad bridge right near and just north of the crossing.
I only saw that crossing in action once in my life that I can remember and I was five years old at the time, but do remember seeing another crossing north of it, south of 9th Avenue, in action at least one time way before that and I must have been two or more likely four when I saw that crossing in action. I was riding on a bus with my mother when I saw that crossing in action, and in case you're interested, it had wooden wishbone gates at the time. The one with the cantilevers had more-modern fully-upright gates. And it too was a cloudy day, possibly late October or early November of 1990. But my grandmother, mother, and I, and my sister, were stopped at this crossing, and after we stopped, I looked to the crossing on our left, the one on Massachusetts Street and saw the gates down at that crossing and was able to see the lights on those gates on, probably only because it was a cloudy day, if it was sunny, I wouldn't have been able to. Then I saw the train cross Massachusetts Street, then I heard its horn before it crossed Broadway, where we were. As the train passed by, my grandmother had me count the cars, which I apparently didn't do such a good job of doing. I never counted the number of train cars before that time and even after that time I still rarely do that.
And just like in this story, after the train passed, the gates didn't both go up at the same time, the one in front of us went up first and the other one went up a short time later. I never saw that happen before at any crossing and that was the only time I ever saw that crossing in action. I've seen several trains on that track but that was the only time I saw that crossing in action, I've seen some of the other crossings on that line in action (I haven't spent that much of my life in Gary, Indiana.)
This story doesn't take place in Gary, Indiana, and I haven't decided if this took place in Elwood City or not. But I decided to take my memory, which was a mostly good memory and back-story and turn it into a story featuring Arthur and Buster and made Arthur and Buster adults, but did not include a fourth person in the car, just me and Arthur and Buster. And though I do remember that time, I cannot remember the conversation between my mother and grandmother, (who can, especially when this was back when one was five years old?) so I had to get really creative with the conversation between Arthur and Buster, and it wasn't easy to decide what to give them to talk about. But I kept some of what really did happen in my fiction story. The real train I saw didn't have white locomotives, I believe they were blue or black, and I think some of the freight cars, if not all of them, were covered hoppers (the train in my story was all boxcar).
Now in real life, the crossing had all incandescent lights, and might still do to this day. But I decided to give the crossing in my story General Electric/ Harmon fading L.E.D.s and the lights are 12x24, both in real life and in my story. And the gate lights are 4" lights in real life and in my story, however, I changed the lights in my story, making them look like those round L.E.D. lights seen on some school-bus STOP signs, only 4" when normally I do them in 7"like I did this in one other story (See the Maya and Miguel story "Author's Rail-Fanning Trip") The G.E. Harmon fading L.E.D.s do exist in reality, but not on the Broadway crossing, but I made up the gate lights. I mean the lights do exist but not as gate lights, rather as school bus STOP sign lights.
Thanks for reading, and I will try to get more Arthur stories on this fandom.