The passenger rail service between GLMZ and Toledo ran for forty-one years, from 2170 to 2211. It was not glamorous. It was a single line, two trains, running a daily round trip on track that had been rebuilt from pre-collapse rail infrastructure by a consortium of GLMZ transit interests who believed, correctly for a time, that overland rail between the two city-states was commercially viable. The distance was manageable — approximately 380 kilometers. The terrain was flat. The track was straight. The trains were utilitarian and reliable. For four decades, the Meridian-Toledo line was the most normal thing about the Great Lakes region. It ran on time. It carried passengers and light freight. It connected two cities in a world where connection was increasingly rare.

The problems began in 2208. They were subtle at first. The transit time, which had been consistent at approximately three hours and forty minutes for decades, began to vary. Some trips were ten minutes short. Some were twenty minutes long. The variation was attributed to track conditions, weather, and the general degradation of infrastructure that affects everything in the GLMZ. But the variation increased. By 2209, the transit time on certain runs exceeded five hours. The train's speed had not changed. The track had not been extended. The distance between the two cities was, according to every survey and satellite measurement, exactly what it had always been. The train was simply taking longer to cross it.

In 2210, the track began to curve where it should not have curved. Maintenance crews dispatched to inspect the line reported that the rails, which they had surveyed as straight, were bending — gently, almost imperceptibly, but consistently — to the south. The curves were not the result of ground subsidence or thermal expansion. The rails were curving in their mounts, the steel bending in a direction that metallurgists said was impossible without application of force that would have left visible deformation marks. There were no deformation marks. The steel was smooth. It was simply no longer straight. Crews re-aligned the sections. The curves returned within weeks.

On August 3, 2211, the westbound train from Toledo to GLMZ departed on schedule and arrived at a station that was not Toledo and was not GLMZ. The train followed the track. The track led to a station. The station was physically real — a platform, a roof, signage in a language that the conductor could not read, and beyond the platform, a city that no passenger recognized. The city was inhabited. Figures were visible on the streets. The architecture was unfamiliar. The passengers, by unanimous and unprompted decision, refused to disembark. The conductor reversed the train. The return journey took four hours longer than it should have. The train arrived in GLMZ at 11:47 PM, seven hours and twelve minutes after departing what should have been a three-hour-and-forty-minute run in the opposite direction. Every passenger was accounted for. Every passenger was shaken. Nobody could agree on what the station had looked like, except that it was not where they were supposed to be.

The service was not rescheduled. The consortium did not issue a statement. The trains were decommissioned and the track was officially deactivated, though deactivation in practice meant simply not running trains on it anymore. The track remains. Aerial surveys show it stretching eastward from GLMZ, straight for a while, and then curving — still curving, fourteen years later, bending southward toward a destination that the rails appear to remember even if no one else does.