So, is that gravel....just free? Like, can anyone just take it?

Star Spangle intensifies

the railroad actively sends out crews to maintain the tracks.

Damn, the railroad spawns its own crews for maintenance? That's crazy

I was just in Japan and even some of their active rail lines have huge 4 ft tall weeds growing in the rail yards

So THAT'S what looked off... And reminded me of where I moved out of...

Welcome to the American ~dream~ nightmare.

One time, I was driving through one of these old towns, and I got pulled over because I didn't make a complete stop at a stop sign. Admittedly, I was in the wrong, but the judge in town was insane, and coincidentally the father of the sheriff who pulled us over. So the judge tried to have me and the people in the car executed in some crazy deathcoaster contraption unless I agreed to marry his daughter (who bore a striking resemblance to Gus Polinski) but thankfully we managed to get out of there. Also, we got to party with Digital Underground for some reason.

And these towns tend to have like 2.75 cops per person and they aren't afraid to pull you over for going 26mph.

I lived in one of these town for four years. Just before I moved there, they'd made national news for pulling over an ambulance. It was hauling ass taking someone to the hospital, but the local cops felt that issuing a ticket was more important.

The town is also the county seat and regional state patrol center. It's the highest ratio of law enforcement to citizens in the entire state.

The first day we arrived my wife was pulled over for doing just over 25. Welcome to town!

Not here in the USA!

Brick isn't as common in the US. It's more "regional." I'm most towns, you'll have like one or two brick buildings and that's it. A town hall, maybe a church.

London is an extremely old city. In the US, the older areas with older buildings like New York often have brick, but almost everywhere else, where most structures are less than a century old, they use alternatives. Most commonly this is lumber framing with exterior siding (either wood or plastic), interior sheet rock (“drywall”), with fiberglass insulation in between.

Can confirm. Most of my state is like this.

This gave me big flashbacks of where I grew up. It was great as a kid, a ton of urban exploration opportunities, but I wouldn't want to live there now.

Would you classify your castles as "every building is bricks" or "random pile of gravel"?

Tracks should have at least a few decent sized trees growing in the middle. Or, if you're in the Midwest US, they should dead end at a random field where a manufacturing plant once stood.