The most depressing thing about my grandmother’s death was that she had outlived all of her children and three of her grandchildren. I guess that’s the price you pay for living to one hundred and eight.

My mother was a very late-in-life baby. She was born when grandma was forty-four. She said it was hard growing up because grandpa – her dad – had died in a farm accident just before she was born and all her siblings were grown up with families of their own by then. So, it was just her and grandma out on the farm by themselves.

When she told me that story, I was never sure if it was to tell me that she understood my loneliness– the only father I knew was a tombstone in the local military cemetery – or she was asking me to understand her own emptiness. In any case, mom had to work and I spent a lot of time out on the farm with grandma.

I was born when mom was forty-two. That means my grandmother was eighty-six when I was born. She still worked the farm she had inherited from her parents. Actually, for most of my life, she rented it out for crop share and only supervised things at planting and harvest. I don’t know how much actual supervision she did, but I remember her and me sitting out in the pickup watching the tractors as  they planted or the combines when they harvested. They took grandma’s license away when she was ninety-seven, but she still drove around on the farm to watch the planting and harvest.

I stopped going out to the farm once I got to high school, but after mom passed away from breast cancer, I started going back again. I kept telling myself it was my duty as family to go see her, but the reality was I got more out of our visits than she did.

When I was a little girl, I once asked her if she was lonely out there on the farm all by herself. The farm was fifteen miles from town and the closest neighbor was over three miles away. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “No, I’ve got the trains to keep me company.” She then smiled at me and patted me on the head and said, “You will understand that someday.”

A railroad ran through the middle of the farm. Evidently it had originally been a “milk train” and had passed right alongside the barn so grandpa could load the milk cans onto special flatcars. The days of milk trains are long gone, but the track was now a regular main line and heavy freight and coal trains rumbled by many times each day. The house would vibrate slightly as they passed and the chandelier in the dining room would sway just a little from side to side. It took me several years to realize that grandma didn’t have some sixth sense that could tell her when a train was coming. If the pull chain for the lights in the chandelier started making little circles in the air, a train was coming. Thirty seconds or so after it started swinging, you could hear the whistles or feel the vibration of the ground.

A few months before she died, I asked her if the trains still kept her company. She startled at first, but then smiled at me and said, “I’m too old for the trains now...” She gave me a very funny smile and patted my hand as we sat together at the kitchen table. The she added, “but I think the trains can really help you with your loneliness.”

It wasn’t until after her death that I found out that she had someone take her into town the next morning and changed her will. Previously it had said that the farm was to be sold and the proceeds divided evenly between the five surviving grandchildren. The new will cut out the house and the twelve acres around it with the rest to be sold and the proceeds divided. The house and acreage was bequeathed to me, her only granddaughter.

One of the cousins had a fit about that and went to a lawyer. There was five of us and a little over six thousand acres of land, so the change was almost insignificant, but cousin Frank felt it was unfair to him. The executor of the estate– grandma’s lawyer– said that if I really wanted the house, the easiest thing for me to do was to take twelve acres off my share of the land sale. He worked out some weird formula to apply to the distribution after the sale and Frank agreed.

That’s how I ended up living on Grandma’s farm. It’s a bit of a drive, but with no rent payments it was very easy to manage financially. The proceeds from the sale of the farmland, itself, allowed me to make any necessary repairs and improvements to the house and the out buildings. We tore down the oldest barn and repaired the roof on the newer one so I could use it as a garage and for storage. The old milkhouse between the two barns, however, proved to be somewhat of a problem. I had never been in it and thought it was empty and abandoned. It wasn’t.

“I really don’t know what to tell you,” the contractor told me. “It is all really old fashioned, but has been kept in perfect condition.” He then took me on a tour of the small building.

One half of the building was occupied by four HUGE batteries and what looked like a strange electric motor with a really old gasoline engine connected to it. “That windmill thing on the roof,” he explained, “is a Delco Generator system. It was how farms used to make their own electricity for lights and stuff. If there was no wind and your batteries were going flat, you could use the motor generator. Your grandparents must have gotten it right after World War II to power milking machines.”

He shook his head and added, “This area finally got electricity from the REA about ten years after that. When that happened, most people took out their Delco systems or sold them for junk. This one is in perfect shape. She must have had somebody come out and do regular maintenance on it, but I don’t know why. There are no lines leading to any of the other buildings.”

He paused and then said, “There’s a checklist on the wall that has a date from last year. You can call the phone number and see if they have a contract or what.”

The other half of the building appeared to be a bedroom– sort of. It had an old fashioned brass bed centered against the end wall of the room and all sorts of strange glass tubes mounted on the side walls. The tubes ranged from a few inches to several feet long and from the size of a pencil to several inches in diameter. Each of the tubes had wires connected to the ends and a long strip of flat metal running through the center of the tube. Maybe I should say two strips of flat metal, because the strip was slightly open in the center. The wiring seemed to lead to a large black electrical box next to the bed.

“I have no idea what all this was for,” he said. “But I can put a new roof on the building without bothering the insides. That, and some new paint is all it really needs. Maybe you can figure out what your grandmother used all this for.”

I looked at him and said, “Loneliness.”

“What?” he exclaimed.

“Grandma always said the trains helped with her loneliness,” I explained. “I guess she used to come out here sometimes to sleep so she would be close to the trains.”

“That’s makes sense,” he answered. “The rest of this stuff is probably left over from when this was actually a milk house.”

“They sold the cows when Grandpa died,” I said sadly.

I told him to fix the roof and paint the outside. Then I forgot about it.

***

By the end of the summer, all the work was done on the house and out buildings. One gray, fall Saturday, I was sitting in the living room looking out at the barn when a train went by. “Grandma,” I said aloud, “I think it’s time for me to find out what you intended when you left me the milkhouse.”

I startled myself when I said that. Not because I said it aloud, but rather because I had said milkhouse rather than farm. I meant to say farm, but somehow milkhouse spilled out of my lips.

“The milkhouse!” I said aloud.

I walked across the large backyard and stood before the old door to the small building. My hand was shaking as I reached out and slowly turned the old doorknob. It opened with a creaking groan. “Funny,” I said– I think out loud, “I didn’t remember it making so much noise when I was out here with the contractor.”

I went inside and flipped the small light switch. A very small, and very dim light came on. I stood looking at the switch for a few moments wondering if maybe the batteries had gone dead, but then I saw the old fashioned wire-wound rheostat connected to one side of the wiring just above the switch. It turned like a dimmer switch and the bulb got much brighter. 

“I guess dimmer switches aren’t just a new invention,” I muttered to myself. “But why would Grandma want it dim in here?”

I turned the knob back to its original position so that the room was once again in near darkness.

I don’ know if I first felt the vibrations or first saw sparking in one of the glass tubes. A train was approaching and the rumbling was causing the metal in the tube to vibrate. As it got closer, several more of the tubes began to spark. When it blew its horn, several more of the tubes began sparking.

“They’re vibration sensors,” I said as I stepped over to the wall and held my hand against one of the tubes. “And they are different lengths to pick up different frequencies... but why?”

The train was really close now and the small room was rumbling and shaking. Then the engineer blew his horn again. All of the tubes began sparking wildly. “But what do they do?” I asked myself again as I looked around the room.

That’s when I noticed the drawers under the bed. I opened one of them and found a coil of really old looking wire. One end of it had two big connectors– one red and one black– that looked a little like bullets. The other end had a heavy metal tube that was rounded at one end with the wires going into the other.

I stood next to the bed looking around the small room trying to figure out what the two connectors were suppose to plug into. Then I saw the row of circular plugs behind the bars of the bed’s brass headboard. They were barely visible beneath a curtain which hung on the wall. The plugs were grouped by twos, with each plug having a small circle of red or black around a dull brass center.

When I moved the curtain aside and looked closer, I could see small black plastic tags above each set of plugs. In white lettering the tags said, “Whistle” or “Distant” or “Close” or “Constant.”

I carefully pushed the red and black bullets from the tube I was holding into the set of plugs labeled, “Constant.”

Nothing happened. Then I saw an old fashioned, brass, two pronged open switch with a long, black, plastic handle on the wall next to the headboard. I pushed the switch closed and almost dropped the tube as it began vibrating violently in my hand. One of the tubes on the wall was buzzing loudly even though there were no trains going by.

“It’s a vibrator!” I exclaimed as I held it up to my cheek to check the sensations. As I felt the vibrations against my skin, I smiled and said softly, “What a naughty girl you were, Grandma.”

I pulled the switch back open and set the vibrator on the bed so I could explore the rest of the drawers. After a few minutes I had several different coils of wire and a very old jar of Vaseline laying out across the bed. All of the wires had the red and black bullet connectors, but each seemed to have a different, unknown, purpose. 

One set had a smaller, tapered tube that seemed to be made of black plastic with two strips of brass running up the side of the tube. I held the tube in my hand turning it slowly trying to figure out what it did and then suddenly I remembered an ad for an “anal torpedo” which had popped up on my laptop when I was checking out a porn for girls site.

“Oh my God!” I squealed, “an anal electro-probe!”

Suddenly all the rest of the strange devices on the bed made sense. The strange looking clips were nipple clamps. The small and large circles of leather with metal pads on the inside of them were wrist and ankle electrodes. The leather belts with multiple thin, brass plates on one side were to attach electrodes to the body in various places. And the long, thin, strange looking clamp that had only a single red connector had to be... no it couldn’t be... but what else could it be... a clit clamp.

I totally wanted to test out Grandma’s old-fashioned equipment, but I really wasn’t sure how much electricity they might deliver. I pushed the curtain fully to the side and found that each of the plugs was apparently connected through a wire-wound rheostat like the lights were. As I carefully examined each dimmer, I realized that most of them were set almost as low as they could go– except the constant one which powered the vibrator. It was turned to what appeared to be about 75% of maximum.

“I don’t have to test them all at once,” I said softly to myself. “And all I have to do is pull the switch and everything stops.”

I really don’t remember getting undressed, but the next thing I knew I was lying naked on the bed. With the help of some Vaseline which was in an old jar in one of the drawers, I now had the vibrator in my pussy and the anal probe in my butt. I hadn’t plugged it in... yet, but it was inside me.

I lay back on the bed... when had I pulled the bedspread down to expose the sheets? Then I reached up and closed the switch.

I’ve used vibrators before, but this one was different. It was less smooth and it seemed almost to be jerking up and down inside me rather than just buzzing. I lay there murmuring to myself for a while and then I reached up and opened the switch.

Once I recovered from the vibrations, I got up on my hands and knees and plugged in the anal probe. I lay back and again closed the switch. The vibrator again began pulsing in my pussy, but nothing happened on the back end.

I thought maybe I had done something wrong, but then I remembered, “Trains... it only works when the trains go by.” So I lay back and enjoyed the sensations while I waited for the next train.

I didn’t have to wait very long. I could see one of the longer tubes on the wall starting to spark slightly. Soon more of the tubes were sparking. In the very dim light, they created a flickering light in the room.

The train came closer and closer. I could feel the rumbling as the whole building began to shake. Then the tube which controlled the anal probe evidently began to vibrate because I started feeling my asshole quiver. There weren’t any real shocks, but it felt like someone was pushing and pulling on the probe. It was nowhere near as intense as I had expected. It was, however, enough to take me over the top.

After the train had passed, I lay on the bed panting. I found myself saying, “Grandma, I think I know how the trains kept you company.”

It is now the middle of winter. Once it starts snowing, it can get really lonely out in the country. I have a neighbor who drops by and plows out my drive and the area around the barn. I use a snow blower to make a path to the milk house.

I’m laying on the bed waiting for the next train. The drawers are mostly empty, except for the clit clamp. I don’t know if I will ever be brave enough to try that one. I’ve adjusted each of the devices so they give me pleasure– though sometimes after several trains have passed, I turn them up a little so that they are right on the edge of pain.

Some of the folks in town ask me how I can stand to stay out on the farm over the winter. “Don’t you get lonely?” they ask me.

I always give them a sly smile and say, “I’ve got the trains to keep me company.”

This is a VERY mild story that will primarily appeal to those who are into machine self-stimulation or have a fetish about steampunk. There is no explicit sex. Instead this sets up a fantasy which some will live out in their own minds long after the story has ended