The Railway Ponies: Highball
Written by The Descendant
Edited by Inquisitor M
Pre-Reading by Fury of the Tempest
Cover Art Provided by Yalcahoon
Chapter 1
I have always thought that if there was ever a stallion and a steam engine that were made for one another, then it was old Highball and his longtime partner, #3803.
They were made of the same stuff, and any railwaypony that laid eyes across the engineer as he tended to his locomotive would soon come to see it. Of all the railway ponies who sang the song of steel, he was the one I most admired. He was the one I wanted to be like.
I wanted to be like Highball.
In my youth, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would cost to do so.
“Ain’t it somethin’?” Grease Pit, master mechanic of the roundhouse, would say. Nodding in the direction of the older stallion, he’d wipe the oil from his hooves and ask me again, “Ain’t it somethin’, the way that he takes care o’ that engine—the way he’s able to sling his trains up and down the Old Main? Ain’t it somethin’, colt?”
“Yes sir,” I’d answer as I looked up from whatever I’d been occupied with. “Yes sir, it’s something to see alright.”
I was only a wiper in the roundhouse, but I’d always known that I was going to be an engineer. I’d known that long before I’d hired out on the Baltimare & Ohayo Railroad. I’d known that for a great long while. “Yes sir,” I’d say again, my mark burning bright. I could see that “something” that Highball had in him, that thing that made him a true railwaypony.
I could be that, too.
I could be like Highball.
I loved working in the roundhouse. I never tired of cantering onto Sutler Street and catching a glimpse of the roundhouse. On winter days, tall columns of steam rose from the smokejacks, bathing it in wisps of white. In the earliest part of the day, when the moisture of that dying winter hung in the air, I could stand between a couple of engines awaiting an assignment and listen to them breathe.
Yes sir, I said breathe.
That’s what makes a steam engine different from any other thing ponies build, and don’t let anypony ever tell you different. A steam engine is the closest ponies have come to making life itself. Each one feeds, breathes, feels, reacts. Each has its own personality. I would stand there on foggy, hazy mornings in the roundhouse, listening as the compressors came on. The beasts rumbled softly, a long, slow whuffff that filled the air around them. Each one sighed in their slumber, seeming more like behemoths of legend than constructs of steel. They breathed their smoke and steam, and there was a special magic in it.
Highball knew that.
Highball was a gentlestallion engineer of the old style. He was the best engineer on the Canterlot Division. Heh, he was probably the best on the Baltimare & Ohayo. His on-time, demerit, and safety cards were as clear as a virgin’s conscience, and his steady hooves had guided the division’s best trains up and down the Old Main longer than I had been alive.
He wore a necktie and a vest, adding a bit of style to the typical engineer’s garb. His beard was full and tidy. His grey eyes were keen and sharp behind the tiny glasses he wore, and they rested gently on his muzzle in their wire frames. He kept his mane pulled back, lest it get caught and tangled in some mechanization of the trains. That was never a good thing. I adopted the practice myself after checking in one day to find that one of my fellow wipers had learned that lesson the hard way.
Cleaning up blood was part of my job description, but I didn’t dwell on it. Railroading was always a dangerous job. Steel can only be made so safe. Highball knew that, and as a result he respected his engines.
He had been dancing the decks of engine cabs for decades, and each time he’d been assigned a new engine he’d made it his partner, not just his tool.
“He always takes it hard,” an engineer named Crosshead once told me. “He never likes to be assigned a new engine. Sometimes he even cries; it’s almost as though he never realizes he’s getting a better one!”
Now, keep in mind that this was back in the days when an engineer was assigned an engine… and an engine assigned an engineer. The two were inseparable until the company said that they were to be broken up. The engine could be replaced, or the engineer retired…
...or both could go to glory together in a wreck. Either way, they were partners for life.
I’ll say it again: I always thought that if there ever were a stallion and a steam engine that were made for each other, then it was old Highball and his longtime partner, Ten-Wheeler #3803.
Technically speaking, she was a TW3a class 4-6-0. That’s four guide wheels up front under the smokebox, six drivers, and no wheels under the firebox or cab, for you folks who may not be adept at the technical side of railroading. Her drivers were taller than a stallion, and her lines said “fast” and “strong” in every way that mattered.
Number 3803 was one of twenty-five such engines ordered from Equestrian Locomotive Works just shy of twelve years before I had hired on with the railroad, all numbered from 3800 to 3824.
A hostler at the engine works ran #3800 over a derail protector. He managed to flip it off the damn tracks and the engine slid down an embankment. The hostler was fired, of course, and that engine’s boiler still sits down in the river to this day.
Early in its career, #3801 came into Saddleburg on its run down from Baltimare on the Old Main. One of the overly decorated “Toy-class” engines had just grabbed its train to take it up the awful stretch of track to Canterlot. At that moment #3801’s boiler exploded due to low water. It turns out that the unicorn who set the spells on the water level gauge had cast them wrong. I was in school at the time, and I remember hearing the explosion.
The entire engine crew was killed.
Number 3802 was eaten by enchanted parasprites.
It seemed that the entire class of engine was about to be deemed “hoodoo”, or cursed, by the whole railroad, but then came #3803—then came her master, partner, and friend, Highball.
Together they held court over the Old Main, and they were a wonder to behold. If ever a machine and a stallion had been meant to be together, then Celestia herself couldn’t have done a better job matching them up. The engine complemented his style. They were no-nonsense but not cold, firm but fair, intuitive and predictable at the same time.
He called her “she”, never “it,” and out of deference for him, we all did the same.
“Morning,” Highball would say with a small nod, smiling as he ventured into the roundhouse to collect her for a run. “Are you the wiper who has been taking care of her?”
I wasn’t always assigned to wipe #3803, but when I had, I made every excuse to stay as near the engine as I could until he arrived. “Yes sir,” I’d say. “I did the glass and all the brightwork, shook down the fire, and helped Bullpen set up a new one.”
“Very well,” he’d say. “Thank you, colt. You did fine. Mighty fine.”
Bullpen was the hostler, the stallion in charge of moving engines in and out of the roundhouse. His job was to have ponies line up the turntable and take the locomotive out to where the switching crew and their little engine had made up a train. An engineer didn’t ever need to see the inside of the roundhouse stalls if he didn’t want to, but Bullpen always wore a smile when Highball came around.
“She sounds good,” Highball would say, his ears twitching as he focused on the sounds the engine was making. Bullpen would smile at me, and then we’d stand there grinning like great vast morons as the stallion worked his way up and down the locomotive. Highball wasn’t above getting his hooves dirty, even if his vest always seemed to stay clean of oil and soot. He’d look each moving part over, and then look them over again. The quiet stallion would add oil to the lubricators that still dripped with the oil that I had already added, just to be sure.
Watching Highball look #3803 over was like watching a stallion waking his mare from their bed. He used all of his senses. He seemed to be able to smell if some part was too hot. He knew all of her moods, and could hear even the tiniest complaint deep inside her workings.
“Is she good to go, Highball?” Bullpen would ask.
A small smile would find its way across the older stallion’s face. He’d nod to us as the ancient timber of the roundhouse looked on in approval. “It seems so. I should say that all is in order,” he’d say. Highball would nod to us once more, and then the gentle old stallion would lift himself into the cab.
I would watch with envy as a firestallion would join him. If they were worth their saltlicks, the firestallion would already have the fire high by the time Highball was done with his rounds. If not, the engineer would sit in his timeworn seat, wiping his handkerchief up and down the instruments. He would check the gauges and his bright brass watch over and over, silently letting the firestallion know that a lady was waiting.
When all was good and proper, Highball would set the reverser and open 3803’s throttle. At his touch, the good lady would come awake. He never set sand in the roundhouse–a professional courtesy–and he never needed to. Number 3803 came to life like a mare slipping gracefully down a stairwell at a formal reception.
Any decent firestallion would already be setting the injectors, serving the engine some sips of cold water to prepare her for her groom. These were the days before feedwater heaters, and a firestallion had to be careful. More than one of them saw me gazing up to them with daggers in my eyes as they made the engine “cough.”
Oh, how I envied them! I could feel little waves of jealousy ripple along my coat whenever I watched them take as fine an engine as #3803 out onto the turntable. My ears went back, angered that they got to head out on the mainline while my days centered around oily rags. Every one of 3803’s perfect lines would be highlighted in the sun as it turned on the table, her brass gauges and levers, the “bright work” of an engine as we called it, caught the light. Her faultless boiler jacket shone in the pink-orange light of the morning sun. I almost whinnied like a wild horse every time I stood there watching with a subtle wrath as some other colt got to head out to the yard or station to pick up a train.
My eyes were always on Highball. The second he sank into that right-hoof seat, he was at home. No stallion and no engine were ever more meant for each other, and as they steamed out of the circular confines of the roundhouse, the locomotive’s wheels didn’t even slip a fraction of an inch. So attuned was he to her moods that only a light touch of his hooves was needed to bring out her best behavior, power, strength, and speed.
Some day, I would say to myself, watching her tender disappear through the narrow gap of sunlight in the roundhouse walls, I will be the firestallion on an engine like that, and then an engineer. I was made for it, just like Highball.
The last cloud of steam and smoke would disappear across the stalls and bays of the roundhouse. “Number 457 just came in and needs to have her fire cleaned out,” Bullpen would say, or something to that effect, calling me out of my waking dream.
“I’ll get right on it,” I’d say. Soon enough, I would be wiping down my next engine. Each one was a true and worthy machine, each with a unique personality, but there was only one #3803. There was only one Highball.
Every railwaypony is prescribed their own materials by the company they hire on with. The workers on the Baltimare & Ohayo were no different. On every rulebook, inspection torch, derail device, or switch lock sat some embossed, engraved, or painted notice that the item belonged to the company.
Be it the silverware in the dining cars or a simple pasted notice on a label beneath the desk of the company president herself, everything that the great long foreleg of the company embraced was marked as such. It could be an extravagant notice such as “This rule book is property of the Baltimare & Ohayo Railroad Company, Inc. and is hereby leased to the undersigned for the duration of their employ” down to a simple “B&O” stamped in the tin of a lantern hood.
Truth be told, the company can put their name on anything that they like, but each pony knew what was theirs, and they guarded it jealously. Oh, it was easy enough to see with the big things like engineers and their engines, and conductors and their crummies. But in all honesty, such avarice touched each of us. Every brakestallion had a lantern to call their very own, and it was not to be touched by any other. Every firestallion had a coal scoop that they favored, and they would not suffer others to lay their hooves on it.
Yessir, every firestallion had his own coal scoop. In time, even me.
I came to work at the roundhouse one late spring morning to find Grease Pit standing in front of my locker, growling at me like a housecat caught in a pickle barrel.
“I don’t ever want to see your name on the wiper board again, colt!” he barked.
“I-I’m sorry! W-what did I do?!” I answered as I backpedalled my hooves across the tiled floor of the locker room.
He stared at me for a second… and then let loose with a belly laugh that brought other colts and stallions trotting into the locker room to see what hubbub could be about. “Why, colt, what’ve you done? Why, you’ve been promoted, that’s what!” he said, his large stomach bouncing on his chuckles. “Head over to the crew caller’s desk and File Cabinet will get you started on the paperwork.”
I remember standing there gawking, my mouth hanging open like a damned fool as he laughed at his own joke.
“Well, colt, get a move on! You don’t wanna be late for your first day as a firestallion, do ya’?”
A firestallion… I was a crewpony serving on an engine.
I was getting that much closer to my dream.
I was that much closer to being like Highball.
Working in the roundhouse had been hard, dirty work. Being a firestallion was hard, dirty, dangerous, and exhausting.
File Cabinet said that I had enough seniority to bid on a brakepony job, but I turned that down lickety-split. Yeah, they got paid more, but they didn’t get to work the engines. They didn’t help bring the behemoths to life—to feed them and make them breathe and trot along.
Besides, their seniority lead to becoming a conductor one day, not an engineer.
So it was that I became a firestallion. My back has never forgiven me.
When I hired out, the automatic stoker was still something of a fantasy—as much a fairy-tale as the Mare in the Moon. No, we firestallions and our coal scoops were the only things that kept the fires fed—that made the steam to make the engines fly down the rails. There was honesty to the work, and I took to every engine that the callboard assigned me.
“You’ll get the hang of it sure enough, colt,” Crosshead said that first day as I climbed up into the cab of a little black yard switcher. “It’s easy to learn, but damn tough to master. We’ll see what you’ve got in you sure enough.”
During the next year, my scoop, my back, and the whole railroad between Saddleburg and Baltimare learned what I was made of, and I did too. It was hard work, and it took its toll on my body and my mind. There were days that I’d come home to simply sit and shake. My body protested the way I had to stand on my rear legs to shovel the coal. My face felt like it was becoming leather. The hot blast of air escaping the firebox hit me right across my cheeks every time I stepped on the pedal to open the big steel butterfly doors.
But what you’ve gotta understand is that it wasn’t just the fires that we had to keep our eyes on. The firestallions also had to pay attention to the water level, and we were the ones who’d get angry, disappointed stares from the engineer if the low-water chime started going off. We were the ones who would get the demerit if a train had to be stopped on the main for lack of water. That ran only second to the fear of the boiler exploding and sending the crew and locomotive off to the Happy Valley Railway.
Which, just in case you are unaware of railway terminology, is a euphemism for “being blown to bits or killed in any other various and sundry ways upon the railroad.”
Every engine was different, and each wanted its fires tended in a different way. Some were finicky, others ravenous. Some wouldn’t mind too much if the firepony let his fires get uneven… others would immediately begin to buck and snort. Type or class didn’t matter worth a damn either, with a few notable exceptions, as every engine had its own wants and needs.
I started off on the yard switcher, working along with Crosshead. Before too long, I was assigned to local freights, bobbling up and down the Old Main. The district I covered was between Saddleburg and Steeplechase. Other times, I’d be assigned to head south to Capital Transfer at the base of the mountain where Canterlot sat perched high overhead. We worked at all of the small shops and businesses, picking up and dropping off cars of goods, raw materials, and produce. The frequent starts and stops drove me mad, and each time we started again, I had to work frantically to rebuild my fire as the brakestallions swung their lanterns, telling the engineer to come forward, stop, or back up.
It was tiring work; it stole years out of me, and nearly cost me my life.
My engineer that day was Headlight. “Hey, colt,” he said while we pulled up to a water tank. “Fill her up to the top! I don’t wanna stop at Gallopton; I wanna head back to Saddleburg clear through, so fill her up to the top! To the top, colt!”
I mumbled a bit. As though I wouldn’t have filled it up anyway! But, tired as I was, I simply went through the motions. I climbed back over the coal load onto the tender, and as we slowly approached the water tower, I reached up for the chain that would lower the spigot and fill the tender with water.
I pulled at the chain drowsily… and everything went to the Well.
My legs were swept out from under me. Cold, stinging waters cascaded over me as I fell to the sunbaked steel of the tender. My jaw struck first, sending shocks of color through my vision and arcs of pain along my body. The water pouring across the tender washed me over the side, and I went falling to the cold stones of the ballast a good eight feet below.
When I woke up, three stallions were staring down at me. Headlight, the engineer, and Brains, the conductor, wrung their hats in their hooves and made sympathetic sounds. My friend, Fusee, a brakestallion, had my head in his lap. He patted my shoulder and told me to ‘Stay still. Just keep still.’
“W-what in the Well happened?” I asked, awash with confusion.
“You forgot to lift the hatch on the water compartment of the tender,” Brains said, brushing his hoof through his mane and sighing with relief as he saw me moving my legs. “It had nowhere to go, colt, and so over the side you went…”
That was how I got my first demerit. It boiled inside me as I lay on my bed at home taking a mandatory, and unpaid, three-day vacation. My head throbbed, and I moaned in pain, disappointment, and disgust at myself.
“Damnation,” I whispered. “To Tartarus with it all.”
I pictured myself going back to work in the yard, or even to the roundhouse. For a few fleeting moments, I even thought my career might be over. What was there for a colt like me to do with my life if there was no place on the railroad?
The fear was unfounded. It turns out that a single demerit still made me the cleanest of all the young firestallions on the Canterlot Division. So, I suppose, that was why they put me on the trains heading up to Canterlot itself.
Some reward it turned out to be…
I never did like the damn Toy-class engines.
Freights used the original mainline between Saddleburg and Ponyville, but only a few passenger trains stopped at Capital Transfer, the station at the base of the mountain. There, the passengers and freight could be put on an inclined railway up the mountain. The stretch of rail that climbed up the mountain was some of the worst railroading in Equestria, if not on all of Equus.
The line up the mountain was a provision in the Baltimare & Ohayo’s charter. They got to be the first to build a line from Baltimare, but they had to build a stretch up the mountain into the capital city itself, rather than just below.
The line and the engines that were assigned to it were miserable, and there ain’t no two ways about it. The line disappeared into countless tunnels, grasping and clawing for altitude on impossible grades and curves with radiuses that could only be called ridiculous.
The Toy Class engines weren’t any better. I swear that an executive or a politician had designed the damn things as no sensible designer would have approved of them. The rumor was that a politician had thought that the engines serving the capital should look the part and should not be “ugly,” and the railroad had bowed under pressure. The end result was a series of engine classes that were universally despised by railway ponies of all stripes.
What we got were a series of tiny engines, some with wheel arrangements as bizarre as 2-2-0 that seemed like they were designed to be the playthings of eight-year-old fillies rather than steam engines.
“Not what you’d thought when you signed your soul over to the Baltimare & Ohayo, eh colt?” Valve Gear, a rotund engineer, once told me as we flew from one choking, steam-and-smoke-filled tunnel to the next.
“No, sir, not at all,” I answered. I gasped for air as I swung another load of coal into the permanently opened firebox door. It was a waste of heat and coal–just one of the flaws of the class.
The white paint kept getting dirty, and the heat of the engine made it flake off the backhead every time they were repainted, leaving the cab looking like a snowstorm. It was impossible to see out the windows as they’d been made to look like hearts, of all things, and were centered over the back head. The drivers were huge, and they slipped on rails that had as little as a drop of dew on them. More than once, the damn things jumped off the rails because they were so light, leaving the crews staring off into the Well of Souls as the engine dangled precariously at the precipice of the mountainside.
I hated them, and I couldn’t tell if I had been assigned to work the mountain line as reward or punishment. But try as I might to hate the job itself… well, I couldn’t. I was made for railroading. At times, I could look back behind the Toy Class engines to see a string of passenger cars shining in the sun as we climbed the mountain, and I loved every moment of it.
But it was hard work. Damn hard. I worked the mountain all of that long winter. The cabs of the Toy Classes were all steam, snow, fire, and ice at once. Sleet and wind made it seem like a purgatory in that cab even as the passengers sang Hearth’s Warming songs and enjoyed fine teas, cocoas, desserts, and dinners on company china in the dining car that trailed behind.
But it seemed I was being watched all that time. Somepony had liked what he’d seen.
We came down the mountain one day in late winter. The brakes of the cars were protesting, and the damn Toy-class engine we had been assigned slid into the station at Saddleburg on its perpetually petulant drivers. No amount of sand could make those things behave; more than one engineer had taken lesser assignments rather than work the mountain.
Those who had survived that trial, though, had gone on to better things. One of them watched me as I worked the fire of the awful engine after we arrived at the station.
We uncoupled from our train, The Alydar, pulled forward, then backed through the switch at the end of the station track. This left the train for a far more worthy engine to come along and take it up the Old Main to Baltimare. Inside the firebox, the poorly designed slope kept knocking my fire down on top of itself, and I raced to level the flames once again. The firebox doors of the Toy-class engines were only just big enough to fit a coal scoop inside, another one of their faults, and a firestallion had to be careful about how he set the fire.
I could have just left it, as all that remained was to take the engine over to the roundhouse and leave it for the night. But, being the compulsive sort, I wasn’t going to get caught making black smoke. I guess that sort of thing–the way I tended to every engine I worked on, even those I was rather cross with–that finally made me catch his attention.
As I worked my scoop into the firebox, I heard the relief engine come up and glide into place. I barely heard the couplers come together. That was as clean a coupling as I’ve heard, I thought to myself. I doubt the passengers even knew it happened. It must be a fine engineer who can…
My eyes went a little wide. I listened a bit harder, and soon I recognized the sounds of #3803. She had her own voice—her own distinctive note to each chuff and whir. Even her compressor seemed to be more ladylike and austere than any other I’d heard. The whistle sounded out in a single short burst, telling all around her that the engine had come to a stop. I slowly lowered my scoop and turned around, stepping to the deck plates between the cab and the tender.
I looked up past the station platform to find Highball staring down to me from her cab. There was a smile across his face as 3803 sat steaming politely amid flakes of snow, waiting for the prescribed moment on the timetable when she would begin her race up the Old Main.
“Morning, colt,” he said with a nod. He wrapped his scarf around him, and as he spoke, his breath poured out over the station platform in a mist of vapor. “How was the trip down the mountain? Any faults with the train?”
“No sir, no faults with the train, and none with the engine… apart from those that it was designed with,” I said, doffing my striped cap in deference to the senior engineer on the division, my idol, and his fine engine. A cold wind whipped down the station platform, driving a chill through me. I placed my cap back over my wet mane, slick with sweat as it was.
Highball laughed back at me, a polite little laugh, and then nodded in agreement. The reputation of the Toy Class was universally acknowledged; Highball himself had served his time on the mountain grade.
“Well,” he said as he leaned out of the window and looked down the sweep of the passenger cars, “despite all of that, I saw you bring the train down nice and clean. You and the rest of the crew, that is. Nice white smoke all the while. Well done, colt. Well done.”
“Th-thank you,” I stammered, wiping the back of my hoof across my face. “I do what I can. They might not be much in the way of engines, but they do deserve the best I can give them.”
Highball stared at me for a second. He nodded once more, and I saw something go across his face—something that seemed almost grandfatherly in its approval of my statement. “That’s right, colt,” he answered knowingly, “that’s quite right.”
The conductor of The Alydar came forward to speak with Highball, trudging forward through the slushy snow of the station platform. I saw the bright, polished surfaces of their watches glinting in the late morning sun. I made myself busy in the cab of the engine as I listened to them speak. They went over the schedule together, and before too long, #3803’s cheerful whistle sounded out across the platforms of the station.
I stepped back to the deck plate of the cab, and as I watched, Highball cracked open 3803’s throttle and laid down just enough sand to help his engine out of the station. I swear to this day that he never used one grain more than was necessary.
Her drivers didn’t slip even a fraction of an inch, and exactly on the half-minute that the timetable directed, Highball had his train underway. I leaned out once again, looking at the grand spectacle of the train as it began to roll. A cloud of steam filled the station as the cylinders let the thick, heavy rolls of moisture escape across the platforms.
I gazed up just in time to see Highball looking back to me. The same grandfatherly expression still sat in his face. He had watched me looking at the scene in awe—had seen how my eyes looked over the departure with something resembling respect and joy.
He nodded to me again. I lifted my cap. As the train gained speed, the old engineer slipped back into his seat fully. Within moments, The Alydar was racing off into the distance.
A freight train came blasting down the main on the opposing track, covering the scene with grey smoke of its own. I chuckled to myself at the poor job the engine crew was doing. Not long later, I nearly jumped out of my coat when my engineer tapped me on the shoulders, knocking me out of my smirking superiority.
“Come along then, colt,” he said, motioning to the backhead of the Toy Class engine we were in charge of. “Let’s get this hog back to the roundhouse. Back to work… you ain’t Highball’s firestallion yet.”
I nearly dropped my coal scoop.
“Yet?”