If you’ve ever built a model railroad structure (or a model airplane or whatever), you either build it from scratch, build it from a kit, or do some combination of the two.

I am definitely not a scratch builder, so I buy plenty of kits. Occasionally I follow the directions to the letter, but usually I make various modifications to fit my needs and my druthers—rather like cooking a dish from a recipe in that regard. Normally a kit comes with photos or drawings of the pieces and detailed instructions showing how to put them together and in what order.

Normally.

But yesterday the mail carrier rang our bell at a ridiculous hour—7:00 PM for mail delivery!—and handed us this small kit. Below are the instructions in their entirety (no photos, no drawings, no indication what I am building). Can you figure out what they are trying to say?

Categories: Linguistics, Model Railroading