Clueless people

The incident that Greg writes about was back in about 1989 or 90, when we were passing by the then Indianpolis Branch of the Illinois Central (now the Indiana Railroad).
My reporter was by all accounts a very smart gal. I'm not kidding, she was really quite bright and well thought of.
But she was from a wealthy Chicago suburb, and her only experience with trains was commuter trains into Chicago.
What prompted her question was that it was obvious that this train carried no people, so, in her mind, had no reason to exist.
To her credit, she knew about my train obsession, and asked her question.
The train that we were looking at was the Indianpolis Power & Light coal train that frequented (and still does) the line.
I explained that each car of coal would be over two truck loads on the highway, and just count the cars and do the math. She asked a more basic question, "why would they want to haul coal around?"
I pointed to the power plant and said something like, "So the power plant can make electricity!"
She thought about it for awhile, and the light bulb went off in her head, and she started to understand what it was that trains did.
But for the fisrt 25 years of her life, the thought had never crossed her mind.