Apologies, for the delay in updating the post, but there has been some movement on the railway. I took that advice to slow down and started to use the time to try to locate quality umlauts, but because life sometimes gets in the way, the railroad had to be put on the back-burner this year. As a result, I completely forgot that I had placed an order with Umlauts-R-Us âuntil this week, when the parcel finally arrived!
I must admit that the people at Kormsen Branchen Unbegrenzt, the parent company of Umlauts-R-Us, the worldâs foremost supplier of precision-engineered umlauts, had warned me at the outset that delivery might take âsome time.â This is not due to scarcityâumlauts are plentiful in their native habitatsâbut because these particular umlauts are guaranteed to function in countries that do not normally use umlauts. This is a feature that requires extensive certification, acclimatisation, and cultural sensitivity training, making Umlauts-R-Us, the only reliable place to source quality grade umlauts.
As you can see on the package, the shipment departed the factory in Chaco Paraguayo under full documentation, including customs declarations describing the contents as:
- Diacritics, mood-enhancing, double-dot-export grade.
Considering the factory reportedly being on the northern side of the Tropic of Capricorn and 300km away from the closest post office, there was extensive tracking accompanying it.
Almost immediately, the box of umlauts was flagged for inspection in transit. Several postal authorities could not determine whether the contents were punctuation, spare parts, or âsmall expressive eyes,â so they generally routed or re-routed the package onward for examination and clarification.
- In one country, the umlauts were held for three weeks while officials attempted to pronounce them.
- In another, they were stamped RETURN TO SENDER and then immediately stamped FORWARD ANYWAY when nobody could agree where the sender was actually located on a map.
- Reportedly it was even temporarily lost at sea during a short naval battle in the High Sierras, before reappearing at a CVRR depot in Pennsyltucky.
- At least once, the parcel appears to have been redirected simply because a clerk liked the look of it and wanted to add their stamp.
By the time the umlauts arrived, the box bore the markings of a well-travelled package; redirection stamps in multiple languages, dates that made no chronological sense, and a faint smell of international bureaucracy. Inside, however, the umlauts were immaculateâtwo crisp dots per unit, perfectly aligned, and humming quietly with suppressed linguistic enthusiasm.
As promised by Umlauts-R-Us, the umlauts appear to work exactly as intendedâslightly exotic, faintly superior, and entirely unnecessary, which is of course the point, as they appear to be performing flawlessly in a country that has no historical use for them whatsoever. They definitely deserve 
.
So please prepare to for more umlaut enriched Down Under Railway updatesâŠ
âŠbut at a slower pace, so the words can be savoured, giving me some time to re-lay the ROW in the January summer sun 
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And here is a little something to look forward toâŠ
DĂRR
