//------------------------------// // Council Bluffs // Story: Destination Unknown // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// Destination Unknown Council Bluffs Admiral Biscuit She found an outbound train by ten, a slow-moving freight that trundled by her hiding spot. A graffitied Railbox with partially-open doors beckoned her, and she flew inside. Sweetsong had mixed feelings on boxcars. If she stayed away from the doors, she was completely invisible, but her view was limited. That meant less looking at scenery, and things could sneak up on her. There was also the possibility of doors sliding closed, although these had been jammed in position with track spikes in the lower guide rail, which meant somebody else had been riding the car. She caught a glimpse of the Boone and Scenic Valley Railroad as they passed by, then the train accelerated into the farmland, still picking up speed as it rumbled onto a cement bridge. At first, it seemed normal, then she saw how the trees were dropping off on either side and then she was soaring above them, almost like her train had taken flight. She stuck her nose out the side of the boxcar, just to see what they were crossing—she hadn’t seen any wide rivers when she flew over Boone, although she hadn’t looked all that far off in the distance. The river wasn’t much, just a few hundred feet wide, but the land around it dropped down in a wide flood plain, and that’s what the train was passing over, straight and level so the train didn’t have to descend and then climb back up. Then the trees came back up, giving her the illusion of landing, and it was back to fields and small towns. Sweetsong settled down on her blanket in the center of the car, where she could look out both sides and not be seen while the train was moving, unfolded her guitar, and started to play. The acoustics in the boxcar were weird, reflecting the sounds around to where she couldn’t find their source with her ears, although as she got accustomed to them, the echoes let her play in harmony with herself. Usually she played for an audience but today it was for just her and the boxcar. The tracks bent to the north and then back south again, paralleling a road, running through undulating wheat fields. In hindsight, the boxcar had been a good choice; she could watch the cars on the road, and they couldn’t see her. ••• They followed a shallow river for ten miles, finally crossing it on a stubby, low truss bridge that felt completely unnecessary, then ran parallel to another track, oddly separate from her line. Maybe another railroad that wanted to take the same route although that didn’t make a lot of sense for someplace as open as Iowa. Everything she’d seen of it so far suggested that tracks could be put down wherever, with only the occasional river or road crossing to worry about. She could be more restless in the boxcar, she could even fly in the boxcar, although not very far. It was easier to fly backwards; with her hooves on the floor she got the momentum of the train added to her movement, but in the air she didn’t. Half-remembered lessons about working stormclouds came to mind, practically every pegasus was expected to know how to work weather even if they didn’t make a career of it. After a few failed attempts, she managed to flare just right to ‘land’ on the trailing end wall of the boxcar, hanging there briefly before she had to flap her wings and reorient herself. Weather classes never mentioned if a pegasus could do the same on the leading edge of a fast-moving stormcloud, although she thought it might work. She settled back down in her Railbox, far enough away from the doors that the likelihood of being spotted was minimal but where she still had a good view through the doors as the world passed by. Sweetsong rode through prairie and fields, paralleling the other rail line and a highway, finally stopping in a railyard at the end of a large airport’s runway. It was dark enough to vacate her boxcar without being seen, even though there wasn’t a good hiding spot nearby. Certainly not near enough to jump on a train. That could be a problem for tomorrow. Judging by the size of the airport she’d glimpsed, she was near a big city. She could fly around in the morning, figure out where she was, and find out if there was a place she could play her guitar and make some money. Down the tracks, south of the yard, there was a concrete road bridge with weird red and yellow antennas on it. She might get lucky and be able to drop in a hopper or gondola as a train went by underneath. She set her blanket on the top of an abutment, nestled up between the concrete beams supporting the deck, and drifted off to sleep, the rumble of traffic overhead and the distant clanking of rail cars her lullaby. ••• Council Bluffs had a rail museum, and while she couldn’t busk inside the building, she toured it anyway, learning about the people and equipment that had built the rail network she took advantage of. They even had a locomotive simulator, although in her opinion it wasn’t as good as the real thing, even if computer screens made it try to feel real. She probably shouldn’t try to use her newfound knowledge next time she got into a locomotive. She knew how the angle cocks on train cars could be closed to keep the air in the train, and she knew about cut levers and now, if the simulator was accurate, she knew how to make a locomotive go. If she found one idling by itself, she could cut herself off the train and go on her own adventure, at least as far as the switches would allow her. What would the train dispatchers think about that? The museum said that sensors in the tracks knew where trains and even individual cars or locomotives were, so they’d see that their DPU had gone rogue, although they wouldn’t know why. Out on the highways there were police cars that would chase misbehaving drivers, but the railroad bulls didn’t have locomotives, only SUVs. It was fun to think about, and maybe the idea would make it into a song one day. She could picture herself with a pastern hooked over the throttle, head out the window, mane whipping in the breeze, thundering along the main in a borrowed locomotive. Maybe there were places where she could ride on a locomotive and use the controls. Sometimes getting spotted was worth it; one snowy winter day in the mountains of Pennsylvania she’d been less subtle than normal and gotten caught by a yardmaster who’d invited her back to the shack to warm up. He’d offered her coffee and listened to her tales of riding the rails and told his own story about the railroad. He’d even bought dinner to share, an Altoona style pizza which she flew off and got. It was a strange pizza, made with yellow cheese and cut into squares instead of wedges, almost like an open-faced sandwich. As his shift drew to a close, he told her about the mixed freight that was due to come through the yard shortly and left the manifest on the table where she could read it and know in advance exactly which car was her best ride. Sometimes she sent him postcards from places she’d visited. ••• The next display talked about passenger trains, and she learned about the history of the Overland Limited and the Columbine and the City of Salina and the Portland Rose which honestly sounded like a pony name. Unlike the silver-chrome Amtraks, these trains were painted in the same Armour Yellow and grey as the Union Pacific’s modern locomotives. She liked the shiny chrome of the Amtraks, but the yellow looked nice, too. Freight trains were usually a variety of colors, from the typical black of the tank cars, bare aluminum colliers, to the aptly-named boxcar red of boxcars. Dingy grey-white hoppers and yellow Railboxes, the rare blue PanAm car. Everything she saw on display and in museums suggested trains had been more colorful in the past, but they still had variety. She’d even once seen a repatched Klemme Cooperative Elevator hopper that was almost an exact match for her coat. If it hadn’t been sitting on a siding track in long-term storage—judging by the rust on the wheels and the weeds growing between the rails—she might have jumped at the chance at riding it. Sometimes visiting a rail museum made her sad; there was just so much she’d missed by coming to Earth at the wrong time. And sometimes it made her hopeful, it was almost a vision of the future back home: the locomotives would be replaced with larger ones, trains would get longer, she wouldn’t get stuck halfway up the mountain because somepony miscalculated the tractive effort of the pusher. ••• Another display showed pictures of the Golden Spike which joined the rails from the East to the rails from the West and made a transcontinental railroad, and it gave directions to the Golden Spike Monument, which wasn’t very far away. Council Bluffs seemed like a really weird place to commemorate the joining of the two halves of the United States, especially since the display told her that the actual location of the spike was Promontory Point, Utah and she was in Iowa. Still, it wasn’t far to travel, and it would be something fun to look at, and maybe there would be enough tourists she could set out her hat and earn some more bits. Or maybe once she was done looking at the displays she could walk across the street and visit the squirrel-cage jail instead. ••• While the monument was nothing more than a giant, fake golden spike in a park which offered an orbit of concrete, a wooden sign, a bench and wastebasket, and an iron fence to keep tourists from touching the faux spike, it offered a commanding view of a nearby rail line and a few people who were willing to toss her some coins.  One of them asked her about her interest in trains, and she learned that there was another museum she hadn’t discovered yet which had both outdoor displays and a model train, all in and around a historic train station. She didn’t know much about model trains except that some ponies set them up for Hearth’s Warming and that she couldn’t ride them. Clever crystal-powered locomotives tugged short trains filled with painted-on ponies in an endless loop around various other holiday-themed buildings available from local craftsmares and it seemed every year the sets got cleverer and clever; she’d seen a railroad crossing where the guardpony came out of his shack and lowered the gates when the train arrived, all accomplished with levers and tiny springs. Humans had gone one step further; if she put her eyes as close as she was allowed to the edge of the layout, everything looked real, and the locomotives even rumbled like real ones. They didn’t shake her hooves as they went by, but that was a minor complaint. The operator even let her try her hoof at driving a train which went okay—it stayed on the rails and didn’t crash into any other ones, and she made a full loop of the railroad before relinquishing the not-hoof-friendly controls. It was more fun watching them instead of driving them. The operator, who was named Tony, knew a lot about railroad operating rules, and in turn she suggested that they ought to include a hobo riding one of their trains, and pointed out which cars were best for that. He also told her that while she was in town, she should visit the Big Boy and Century which were across the river in Omaha, and she should also plan on staying a second day if she could. She could; she had no set schedule and she wanted to ask why but sometimes it was more fun to be surprised. ••• Dinner was Nashville Hot Bites and a fish sandwich at Southside Jonsey’s Taco House, followed by a quick dip in the pool at the nearby water park, then she flew off to the UP’s railyard and spread out her army blanket on the flat roof of their offices.