The door lands closed behind her. She nearly starts hyperventilating right away. For as many times as she and Steve had pretended to be flying the U.S.S. Enterprise down the tracks… For as many times as they had “encountered” new, fictional species, inspired by terrain features they passed…
None of it had prepared her for the real thing. She’s not even one of the astronauts or anything else, the ones trained in first-contact protocols. As a matter of fact, she’s not even the master of her train!
Yet, she’d still managed not only to pull off a successful first contact, but come out on top. Her position as the train driver probably helped, but so? She’d managed to not only make peaceful first contact- their train’s introduction to hers notwithstanding- but to come out of it as some sort of authority figure. They’d listened to and explicitly obeyed her mention of the safety concerns of having untrained personnel inside the locomotive.
She shakes herself out, and walks woodenly back up into her cab. Steve is unconscious on the front walkway, with the doctor- and Twilight, since apparently she knows the most about where they’re going. Both of the wakeful ponies have instructions to bang on the door if they need her; she needs to watch the displays to keep the train under control.
She clambers back up onto her seat, looking once more out the front of the locomotive. All the other ponies are on the right side walkway behind the cab, sitting on the decking to await arrival in Ponyville. Except, of course, the other train’s crew, and four of the unicorns. Their engineer only has a concussion, the doctor had confirmed- and the other five are simply in too much shock to be conscious. He’d mentioned he expected them to recover on the way over- though he wants the engineer to wake up in the Ponyville General Hospital, where he can check for- and handle- any complications.
She strikes the switches, punches the keys. All six locomotives launch into their startup programs.
Fuel pumps whine, starter motors groan. She listens to the cylinders striking out in her locomotive for a couple seconds before the first one fires. She hears matching roars rise and fall from the other locomotives, settling quickly to an easy idle.
She scowls, and punches up the consist-synchronizing computers. It hadn’t sounded quite right.
She reads down the list. At the bottom of the list, she finds two entries that hadn’t been there before.
Two entire locomotives, directly connected behind the six that should have been there, reporting stabilizing engine RPMs and full fuel tanks. Reporting the same model number as her other six.
She watches the self-test programs flicker through all eight locomotives, coming up green. Steve is going to have a field day with this- not only have they found themselves in another world, apparently, but something changed their train’s consist while it was at it! She punches in a full release on the air brakes and eight compressors start up, increasing the braking system pressure smoothly. About as fast as it had before.
She halts the process very suddenly, before it pumps up high enough to release the train for motion. She’d almost forgotten about Mark- the trainman she’d signalled to protect the back of her train! She reaches for the air horns. The ponies outside probably won’t be impressed by the noise- but she’d rather not leave her own guy out there.
No later than five seconds after the signal, the train intercom chirps. She reaches over for it; her conductor normally handles that. She touches the ‘accept’ key.
“We’re all aboard,” the trainman reports from the other end. “And recovered from… being transformed, somehow. Did we miss a signal while we were out?”
She smirks. “You must have,” she states. “We ready to move?”
“Yes. Something happen to Steve?”
She nods. “Yes. He’ll be okay- but he’s out cold right now, so I’m running us. It seems we’ve found ourselves in another world- but we’ve already encountered some locals up here. We’ve got a destination, about an hour ahead.”
“... Ahh.”
She nods. “Okay, we’ll be on our way, then.” She resumes the compressors- and gives the throttle a tiny nudge. Before long, she feels her locomotive begin to shift under her, overpowering the brakes as it begins to stretch out the slack. One glance at the pressure gauges shows this started about ten seconds before the brakes fully disengage.
At least she shouldn’t have to work directly with any of the locals for the next hour or so.
On the flipside, she will have an hour or so to freak herself out over her apparent transfiguration. She’s used the various urgent problems to keep that off her mind until now.
About an hour passes in this manner. She’s thankful for the visual barriers formed by the hull of her lead locomotive; she’s only just managing to calm herself down, and her reflection looks… frazzled, to say the least.
But now, she has to set that aside. A warning buzzer has gone off on her control panel.
She scrambles back into her seat, scanning the tracks ahead for a moment before looking down to identify the alarm.
She stares at it for a few seconds, facepalms- or is it facehoofs? She knows it’s painful. In any case, after she faceappendage-es, she zeroes the throttle and pulls it into the regenerative territory again. There’s an overheating wheel bearing on her train; it’s not quite dangerous just yet, but it’s climbing faster than a bad bearing usually does. At least, according to the odometer, they’ve just about reached this Ponyville.
And, if that doctor’s float-the-first-aid-kit trick can be scaled, that might vastly simplify the repair process.
Oh, and there’s the banging on the door. She runs her fingers- hooves- through her mane before dropping to the floor… and realizing how effective that action was. After repeating the action on her tail, restoring herself to her original appearance, before trotting down to find out what the ponies on the front walk want.
Turns out they are close to Ponyville; Twilight is telling her the town is just around the corner up ahead, so they’d need to start braking soon, given the acceleration curve she saw before.
She smiles in response. “Oh no- that was an emergency stop. It so happens I’ve already started decelerating, though, so I should be able to make a regular stop at the station without issue.”
The stationmaster raises his eyebrow at the strange rumbling noise as he emerges from his office. He gazes up the tracks; he’d been told, by Unicorn message, to expect a VIP train about half an hour ago… and there shouldn’t be anything else on the schedule until tomorrow. So why does it sound like a hundred or so freight trains are coming, all at once…? He walks up to the edge of the station platform, glancing down at the rails. The faint clickety-clack of an approaching train is already starting to come through them- though it sounds muted, as if only the train’s front wheels are actually on the tracks.
Well, he supposes, if the train weighed enough, it could crush out the noise from the rearmost wheels… But Equestria’s trains couldn’t handle that kind of weight. Only one car had ever been built with enough weight to even begin to do that- and while the track took it like a boss, the wheels couldn’t. That car had derailed just two weeks after commissioning, its front bogies collapsing on its right side. The car had proceeded to fall off the tracks- and pull much of the rest of the train with it. Luckily, the locomotive had been heavy enough it stayed on the tracks; however, its coupler had required complete replacement after being torn off like that.
It doesn’t exactly help that no trains have sounded the station approach signal. So, in theory, this could be a runaway train- one where the engineer has either fallen asleep at the controls or fallen out of his locomotive along the way.
Then he lets out an audible yelp as a tremendously loud foghorn echoes around the corner… And yep, that’s the station approach signal. He groans audibly; that was louder than any Equestrian train whistle is when standing next to the locomotive. And, of course, those whistles are limited in volume for a good reason.
Sure, they’re designed to be heard by other trains that might be nearby, possibly on a collision course- but with how fast trains can stop, they don’t have to be overly loud, and usually aren’t.
There’s no law or anything against a loud whistle- after all, as Celestia stated when somepony tried to make one, the louder it is, the better a chance oncoming trains have of hearing it. However, the industry standard is to avoid excessive volume because it bothers nearby towns.
And this horn sounds like it’s loud enough to…
It rounds the corner, and he immediately bolts behind the ticket frame. That thing is way too large to fit the station.
Then the deafening horn comes in again- and he thinks he hears escaping air at the same time. He doesn’t know- he’s not looking. He’s taking shelter.