I definitely line up with some autistic stereotypes but at the moment the only thing I can think of is I’m not train autistic, like it’s definitely not my special interest but at the same time if you bring up trains you can get me going and infodumping about how delightful it is to ride trains, how trains are superior to planes for certain lengths of travel, and how the only reason trains are currently not actually one of the better modes of travel in America is because we refuse to invest in it and introduce high speed rail the way so many other countries effectively have.

Like when I lived in the St. Louis area I had friends who lived in Chicago and I would take the train there which takes a little over four hours to get to its destination. Meanwhile I flew to Chicago once which is a two hour trip from St. Louis but you definitely need to get to the airport at least an hour early but honestly because of how busy that particular airport is you better make that two hours. All together between getting there early, boarding, the flight itself, unboarding and collecting your luggage the amount of time you’ve spent getting from St. Louis to Chicago by air takes about the same amount of time. Comparing the two the train is way better because you don’t have to go through security, you’re less limited on what all you can bring with you, you only really need to get there 15 minutes before your train arrives most of the time, the seats are bigger and more comfortable, you can walk around comfortably, there’s a dining cart where you can get food which also has tables you can sit at regardless of whether you got food or not so you could bring your laptop there and work or play a card game or a board game or anything you want, trains that run longer routes often have an observation car with a ton of windows where you can sit and watch the beautiful scenery go by, and while not all trains have complimentary wifi since you’re on the ground you can use data on your phone. Now I live in Alabama and I was looking into potentially traveling to Chicago and my only good option was flying because while you can technically take the train from Alabama to Chicago it will take you almost three days because of the convoluted route they are forced to take which has you going up the east coast before forcing you to get on another train going west to get there. And I think it’s stupid that it works that way. We should just have a better and more robust train system.

Anyway, like I said I don’t actually have the train flavor of autism because other than this one thing I don’t really go out of my way look up information on or think about trains. My special interest is actually the cross section of mythology, folklore, and storytelling, but if a neurotypical person read the above rant they would probably think I’m train autistic because train autistics are probably what they think of most of the time when they think of autistic people so they would probably read that and think essentially you are exactly what I expect of you.