NationStates Jolt Archive

The clanging of metal as it is beaten, embers struck hot, steel bent into shapes from perfect lines to curves, from single sheets to boxes. Straight lines of metal made straight and narrow. Then put in place by machinery to serve a purpose. The roar of the furnace as pieces that don’t manage to make the grade are melted back into the great fiery pits. Where the devil roars loudly. The hiss of steam where metal is dunked into water after being hammered into shape, where they are then passed down to fitters who slide together he pieces like a gigantic jigsaw


Metal clangs heavily against metal as a waft of steam rolls across the yard. The Kirsten-tank engine hisses loudly as the coupling is made secure with a mutter and shout from a shunter. The rake of battered goods vans, built a little like boxcars shudder slightly as the whole train lurches back slightly. With a yell from the shunter, who raises his pole and waves at the locomotive crew, he retires across the criss-cross of lines and wagons to a small hut, which belches out a small plume of smoke from the damp surroundings.

Across the yard smoke drifts from another locomotive as it idly hisses, its crew blearily stumbling around the cab as they yank down the weather sheet over the exposed back, it falls shut just as the crack and boom of lightening explodes in the town nearby, highlighting buildings and the harbour below, all brick and wood, all very Midlonian in their design.

The rain begins to hammer down onto the sodden city, the crew of the Kirsten engine slam shut the two wooden doors that had been crudely bolted on to the cab side. The driver rubs his hands and holds them over the firebox as the furnace crackles and hisses back.
“Right John, we’re headed where with this lot?” asked the fireman as he grabbed his shovel and turned to the coal-bunker to throw some more into the smoke box.
“Right up the ruddy mountainside Harry,” replied the driver as he adjusted his flat-cap and knocked one of the levers, an injector, which kept the boiler fed with water and ensured they didn’t explode.

“Shall we get to it then?” the fireman, Harry, asked as he set down the shovel and lent on it.

“As soon as we hear the morning Tourist express go past, aye.”

John reached over and opened a small wooden slide in the door so he could see out, the rain was absolutely thundering down now, pelting and saturating everything around, taking no prisoners. He looked down the length of the wagons and nodded, before taking a seat by the regulator.
“Any moment now.” He muttered as he checked a silver pocket watch and a nod.

The shape thundered past, roaring, clinking and hissing steam and smoke the sleek black shape with a single silver strip shot past, after a few seconds it was gone.

“Righto, time we went then.” John pushed forward a lever known as the reverser, before tugging a little on the regulator. The train lurched forward before clanking and hissing steadily away from the siding, the locomotive rocked and clattered as it went over the points before suddenly becoming smooth, a simple pair of beats echoed around them, the distinctive exhaust sound of Kirsten locomotive and the “Clack-clack” of the train as it passed over the joints of the rails. The train soon climbed up and out from the city and attacked the hillsides, digging itself into the hillside and thundering past smaller towns and villages, pounding continuously as it thumped steadily. The wagons behind rattled and shook, the fading signs on the sides stating they belonged to the Birchester National Tea Company.

The driver and firemen set into their regular routine, chasing the tourist express all the way up the mountainside before eventually passing it, the train struggled on for a further 30 minutes before John shifted from his seat and stretched his legs, the train ambled into a large fan of rails and sidings, nuzzling in-between purring diesel locomotives displaying a single wheel with the words “National Imperial Railway Co.”

John stretched his legs before opening the door, they had gotten above the clouds a short while earlier, allowing them to breathe in the cold mountain air as the exchange yards burst into life.

Imaginatively titled was not the best way to describe Molton Exchange Goods Station. Skulking atop the 2,200-foot eminence of Mount Molaka, the station hunkered down, waiting for the remainder of the rain to pass over the towering hill and drench its side of the island. Unburnt diesel oil hung in a tinted, dismal cloud over the station and its attached Motive Power Depot. Midlonian ships rode lazily at anchor in the distant port of Graveshead, waiting for the wet rails to sing once more with goods to return to the Empire’s ports, mostly coal and iron ore.

The small Midlonian tank engine hissed gratefully, relieved of the strain for an hour or two while she was watered and refuelled. Graveshead Exchange was the sole remaining MPD in the entire country with facilities for servicing steam locomotives, and the engines it did serve were near-uniformly worn, loveless Midlonian machines long past their sell-by date. No glory of tourist expresses here, with smiling crews standing atop shining steel steeds. Here there was only the endless, dull, back-breaking graft of freight haulage, the business that kept the wheels of commerce turning.

The men in the tumbledown mess room adjacent to Exchange MPD’s huge hemisphere of brick-built sheds were fully aware that their job was a largely thankless one; indeed, they took pride in it. To them, the passenger crews who plied from the city’s great passenger termini were objects of contempt, dismissively referred to as “Bus Drivers”, “Passenger Ponces” - or, most popular, the succinctly scornful “Lightweights”. They, by contrast, were the real railwaymen. Their hours were long, their work monotonous, their pay mediocre. But they were proud, fit men, careful to a fault and grateful to their country and their society for their work.

Still, the mess room was hard to bear entirely without protest. The perennial clouds of tobacco smoke within were not the problem; nor, indeed, was the all-pervading odour of bacon fat and sausages, oil and sweat. The problem, in a nutshell, was that the roof had a habit of leaking. Not a few of the men within eyed apprehensively the gathering clouds through the window.

“Fuckin’ ‘ell, look wha’tha ’fuckin’ cat dragged in!” bellowed a rasping baritone voice as the Midlonian crewmen entered. The voice dissolved briefly into a bout of phlegmy coughing, the kind of cough that was usually borne by stunted, elderly women wearing far too much make-up. “We go’ some fuckin’ foreigners in ‘ere!” A chuckle ran through the assembled men.

“Ai, i’s the bloody invaders again!” quipped a young fitter’s apprentice, grinning broadly at the Midlonians as they walked to the canteen, waving and nodding greetings to their “foreign” colleagues as they passed. The enginemen picked up an arranged meal of bacon sandwiches and tea, then took seats next to the baritone.

“Y’all right?” asked the driver, John, as his mate took a grateful bite from the sandwich.

“Ai, can’t complain really,” the baritone replied. A begrimed row of stitched letters on his uniform read simply “Matsua”, but the letters were easy to miss in the combination of oil, tobacco and cigarette ash stains. “Had one of those bastard Anteaters fail on us this mornin’ though,” he growled, jerking a thumb towards the back wall. “Parked the useless bastardin’ thing round the fuckin’ back. Fuckin’ Boer rubbish.”

“Bad?” asked Harry, having consumed half of the sandwich during this brief interval.

“Ai, we were quarter way up the fucking hill, there was a fuckin’ great bang and the fucking engine caught fire. Turns out the fucking piston head exploded, blew a hole in the cylinder big as a thumb and cut the fucking fuel line.”

“D’you ever say anything without a fucking every three words?”

“Fuck off, get eatin’ yer fuckin’ sandwich.” Matsua punched the younger man’s arm gently. “Wharrabou’ you?”

“Wet, hot, overloaded. Usual crap.” Harry shook his head. “Bloody diesel drivers have it easy,” he added, but without rancour.

“Ai, that we do.” Matsua glanced at his watch. “Time to take your lot down the ‘ill, by the look of it. Best not be too fuckin’ ‘eavy.” He waved to the two Midlonians cheerfully as he stepped out into the yard, rain just beginning to spit around him. Behind him, a discarded newspaper’s front page announced optimistically: “MOil Flotation Deal Attracts International Investors”.

Ten minutes later, with the train of Midlonian teabags attached, a grumbling, ex-S.A.R. diesel locomotive slowly negotiated the station’s complex pointwork and grumbled off down the mountainside in the midst of solid sheets of driving rain.