Chapter 3
In the middle of downtown Baltimare, there is a small monument. Engraved upon it is a group of railway ponies. Each one stands there with a look of determination upon their faces and big, heavy tools of the railroad trade in their hooves.
Long, long ago, when railways were young, the streets of Baltimare had come alive with cries of protest. The Railway Riots were something of an oddity in Equestria’s history: an organized demonstration. I suppose it was a big fuss at the time, but it ended up as just one more thing that fillies and colts find on their history tests.
Question: What was the end result of the Railway Riots?
Answer: The Railway Riots created the railroad unions, which allowed the railway ponies to organize themselves to fight for their rights. Also, Green Bean keeps shooting spitballs at me. Please make him stop.
Organize themselves they did. The union card I carry with me shows that is still true to this day.
In the wake of the wreck, management and the unions got together and went about scratching their heads and running their hooves through their manes. How was it possible for the most senior and respected engineer on the railroad to suddenly send freight cars all across the mainline and an engine through a water tower?
In the end, it was decided that there was enough blame to go around. To list the accused: Bullpen for assigning Highball to the train, the crew of the Ponyville terminal for not noting his distress… and of course Fusee, Captain, our conductor, and myself.
Highball, too, of course. Those were his first demerits… his only demerits.
Spread blame around far enough and it gets too thin and it won’t stick to anypony, I suppose. I got my second hoofful of demerits, but not too many. Nopony had been killed, so when all was said and done, it was only a “lost time” incident.
But if the truth were told, far more had been lost than could be figured on accounting sheets marked with the company letterhead.
Fusee and I were the first to recover. “How’d ya like your three months o’ vacation?” he asked the day I returned to the Saddleburg roundhouse.
“My mother is as sick of having me around the house as I am being there,” I said. There was a tightness about my legs and stomach, the second caused by my mother’s cooking making my denims that much less roomy. The tightness in my legs? Well, that would only be corrected with hard work, and I looked forward to getting back to it.
I still have pain in them to this day, on certain days where the humidity is just right. Those were just the first of the few dozen other injuries that I gained through my career.
The second thing to come together was #3803. Or so we thought.
Hard to imagine that she would ever get back on the rails, what with how beaten up she was. I can still see her boiler, cab, and tender sitting on flatcars behind the back shop, looking like a shipwreck thrown up on a beach after a storm. Still, the company mechanical engineers looked her over and saw fit to try to rebuild her.
It took a month, but when she rolled out of the shop, it filled us all with some little shards of hope that things could get back to usual on the Canterlot Division.
But sadly, it wasn’t to be.
I ain’t saying that our shop-ponies aren’t a clever bunch, or that the company stallions who looked her over and gave her the go ahead didn’t know their business. I ain’t saying that at all.
What I am saying is that #3803 never ran right again.
Not two days after coming out of the shops, her lubricators all froze, every one of them, and she limped into Steeplechase with her driver bearings all glowing red-hot. The next month, she shore bits of her valve gear off, sending them flying out into the streets of Baltimare. The week after that, her compressor quit. The whole assembly just flopped forward and nearly landed on a company spokespony who was showing her off to a group of investors.
“I swear,” said Bullpen as he and I limped her back into the roundhouse, “she just didn’t come back together, colt. She… it ain’t the same machine.”
So it was that #3803 went from “she” to “it”. Engineer after engineer left the cab complaining that she wasn’t worth her weight in scrap since the accident, and after a few more faults, she was bumped from the crack trains. She would never pull The Alydar, The Affirmed, or The War Admiral again.
“Damn engine’s gone all hoodoo on us,” whispered Valve Gear. Hoodoo… cursed. Now the whole TW3a class came under suspicion again, and even I had to admit that she just couldn’t keep her fire like she once had. She was a ghost of the engine that I had coveted.
The bright work came out of her, taking her shine down to a dingy black, and the locomotive was assigned to second-string trains. She was put in pool service, no longer a virtuous mare who kept to her sole engineer, but instead to be used by any stallion who drew the short stick and had to take the shattered thing out on the main. Now her runs often ended with the curses of her crews and another trip to the repair bays of the roundhouse or the back shop.
It was a sad sight to behold. I can tell you that for certain sure.
Almost as sad as seeing how Highball came back together… or didn’t.
The company doctor, a few company officials, and some familiar faces from the roundhouse went up to the boarding house where he lived. They asked me to come along, seeing as how he and I had gotten along so well together those few months.
A lovely older mare named Pillow had run the boarding house for decades, and Highball had lived there since he had come to work the division, or so the story went. He had lived there so long that many new boarders thought that they were a married couple, and more than one had mistakenly called Highball “Mr. Pillow.”
The rooms that Highball kept in the boarding house were austere, giving us few distractions as we stood in his parlor, shuffling our hooves and not speaking much. I looked over the few trinkets that I found there as the hushed voice of the doctor arose from the bedroom at the end of the hallway.
I found a photo of a younger Highball and another engine, one that seemed ancient with its open cab and upright boiler. I pondered the stallion in the picture. It was a colt, really, and the rags in his hoof showed that he was an engine wiper. Highball had started out just as I had. Truth be told, it seemed that he was even younger than I was when he hired on with the railroad.
“They say that Highball started on the railroad after coming home from one of The Wars,” Grease Pit said, nodding at the photo. “They say that he was a soldier, sure enough, and that he came home from the front and straight to the home of his marefriend. Word is that he bounced straight up the stairs to her bedroom… and there he found his mare under another stallion. They say he simply walked out and kept going until he wound up working on the railroad. That’s where he’s been ever since.”
“Another version,” said Bullpen, a smirk going across his face, “is that Highball was the ‘other stallion’, and that he ran out of the house and kept running until he found the railroad.”
I winced a little as chuckles went around the room. I had only worked on the railroad for those three years, but I knew by that point to take rumors with a pinch of salt. At times, such as that moment, bags of salt seemed more appropriate.
“If you’d all make your way down here to the bedroom,” the doctor said, “I think that I could use your help about now.” His words had filled the hallway and left a pall that hovered in the air. He may as well have told us that Highball was dying. We all looked at each other solemnly. With what the doctor was about to say, he may as well have been. I placed the picture back on the counter and then joined the quiet procession that made its way towards the bedroom.
Highball wasn’t on the bed, but instead sitting in a large chair made of dark wood and weaved together with wicker. He sat with his face towards the window, looking out over the chimneys of Saddleburg to the roundhouse beyond.
It was five months since the accident. His older body healed slower than mine, of course, but there were some hurts that simply weren’t going to get better. Like his engine, there was something broken deep inside Highball.
He had experienced another one of his episodes, the bizarre seizure that the doctor didn’t even have a name for. It had happened there, in the bed, as his new steel hips settled into his frame. Now he clung to his chair, his ears laying forward and twitching, listening to the whistles of the unseen switch engines in the hidden yard down Sutler Street.
We gathered around him, and Mrs. Pillow sat beside him on a stool, slowly stroking his hoof. Every one of his decades clung to the stallion, and I could hardly believe that the shriveled, shivering mass in that chair had once been the stallion who stared down long stretches of steel with focus in his cool, grey eyes.
“…and I can’t even tell you what’s wrong, Highball. You’ve got the Medical College ponies in Canterlot baffled.”
The doctor was speaking, but Highball hardly seemed to notice. He simply kept staring out the window towards the lingering haze of coal smoke that hung over the unseen railway yard.
“The company sympathizes, Mr. Highball,” said a representative of the management, a pony whose name I never took the time to learn. “But given the seriousness of your condition, we can’t, in good conscience, allow you to continue in your position as an engineer.”
Highball swayed back and forth in his chair. Mrs. Pillow continued to stroke his hoof.
“You wouldn’t even want to take to the high iron again, not with how #3803 is now,” Grease Pit added, surprising us all with his bold statement. “The engine’s in shambles, Highball, and not fit for more than grunt work.”
Highball’s eyes lifted and his nostrils flared, and for a moment he looked every inch like a stallion that wanted to beat a pony for saying something unflattering about his wife. The look soon faded, and before long his ears fell down again. A heavy sigh escaped him, and he wiped his free hoof across his face.
I’d never seen him look so… old.
“There’s always a place for you on the railroad.”
I could sense File Cabinet pulling his glasses off his face, and I could hear the rustle of his cotton shirt as he wiped the glasses clean with the hem. It was more a sign of resignation than of any particular need to clear away any debris. My eyes stayed on Highball.
I watched as decades of hard work and sacrifice filled his face. I watched as a thousand little injuries piled up across his body, stealing the strength out of him. I’ve always been the pondering type, and as I stood there I imagined that every little thing that he’d hidden was coming to light. All of the pain that he’d been able to ignore, everything that having the freedom to fling trains up and down the Old Main had kept hidden from us, and from himself, seemed to wash over him.
I’d never seen him look so… old.
“Colt?”
Highball’s voice drifted around the room. It lingered over the sudsy washbasin, the taut comforter that lay across the bed, and the dusty photos and their frames on the dresser across the way. I lifted my head slowly, as though listening for echoes of Highball’s voice.
“Colt?”
The heads of the other railway ponies followed me as I made my way through the crowd. They parted as I approached him and his chair. Pillow sat stroking his other foreleg as I sat beside him. We sat there, together, just staring out the window across the rooftops of Saddleburg. Wisps of steam lifted into the air in the distance.
“Is it true, colt?” Highball asked. “Is it really true what they say about her… about 3803?”
I didn’t try to meet his eyes, as he had not moved. His gaze still searched the horizon, and his ears flicked at the distant sounds of the whistles in the railyard beyond.
“She… it’s not the same engine,” I said. “I’m sorry, but it’s not.”
I lifted my head as a slow, defeated hiss escaped through his teeth. Misses Pillow looked across the chair to me with accusation in her eyes, as though disappointed that I hadn’t lied to the older stallion.
I lifted my hoof and placed it across his other foreleg. I patted him, too. I simply didn’t have any other tool at hoof. I didn’t know what else to do to console the stallion that I had idolized all of those years. I tried to see something of the keen-eyed engineer in the deflated, broken stallion that sat in the chair. There was little to find.
I sat there, still patting his hoof. His face remained focused on the unseen rail yards far away. Before long there was a great, vast sigh and his chin sank into his chest. At that moment, I watched as a young colt’s dream of singing the song of steel up and down the Old Main, a dream that had sustained him for decades as he matured into a grown stallion, and then an old one, came to an end.
As I watched him, I wondered if I’d end up the same. I wondered if I’d be like Highball, in the end.
The room went silent, and only the sounds of the streets below lingered across the assembly that sat around the old stallion in the rocking chair.
Highball returned to the railroad as a safety inspector.
It wasn’t a very demanding job, and in keeping with his pay as an engineer and his seniority on the railroad. Truth be told, it was work accomplished with a pad of paper. It demanded little more than checking boxes on a mimeographed piece of paper that bore the company letterhead. There really wasn’t much in it for the likes of ponies who were accustomed to a throttle bar in one hoof and a whistle cord in the other.
“Have you said hello to Highball yet, colt?” Bullpen asked me one day. “He just started yesterday when you were marked off.”
I threw my clothes into my locker and made my way out into the engine terminal.
“Highball?” I asked as I swung my head back and forth. I looked past the coal dock and the sanding tower to find him standing silhouetted against a mountain of wood and steel.
“Highball! Highball, welcome…”
I stopped trotting as I realized what was going on, and my hind legs made two parallel furrows in the ballast-choked soil as I came screeching to a halt.
Highball’s head panned back and forth past tall stacks of crossties. They were brand new, their surfaces slick and shiny in the summer sun. The ties were nearly black with creosote. The preservative saturated each one, and the sweet smell that hovered over the stacks of ties made me gag and feel ill. Nearby, new lengths of rail sat shining in the sun, making me lift my hood over my eyes so that I could look upon them. Barrels of tie plates and rail spikes filled the yard all around me.
Miles of track—the very bones of a railroad—surrounded me. The steel sat there, waiting patiently to be laid.
It didn’t make me happy at all.
So, it is true, I thought to myself, shielding my eyes from the glare while I wrapped my head around the sight. It is true… they’re gonna rebuild the Old Main.
Ever since it had been built, the Baltimare & Ohayo had wanted to rebuild the Old Main. Even the difference of a single decade between the Old Main to Baltimare and the New Main to Manehattan was painfully obvious: technology had advanced so far, and magic had been that much more refined.
Maps and diagrams had been sitting across the desks of company civil engineers and track department high-ups since before I was born. The Baltimare & Ohayo’s lobbyists had been working at the political end of it for decades, and now, finally, it seemed that the hour had come.
The hot, humid air of a summer’s day began to linger around me, making the sweet stench of the ties that much more unbearable. The air around me shimmered with the heat, magnified as it was by the acres of steel that surrounded me. The high, droning songs of insects caught in my ears as I blinked in the reflected sunlight and looked for Highball.
I realized, as I looked through the tall stacks of nascent tracks, that this meant the end to the Old Main. This meant another defeat for the old engineer. I caught sight of him as he started to turn towards the yard office, his shoulders slumped and looking withdrawn, thin, and tired. I chose not to follow.
“Yessir, colt,” Crosshead said as we came in from our run. He leaned out of the cab of the engine and waved his hoof across the vast lots of new materials that had come in when we had been out on the railroad. “Yessir, colt, it’s gonna be quite the spectacle. They’re bringing in equipment from all over the railroad. Saddleburg is going to fill up with ponies coming here just to build the new line. It’s gonna be hard to get into the beanery for the next few years, that I can tell you!”
He gave me another well-intentioned swat across the shoulders, nearly making me drop my coal scoop. I looked out the cab window of that engine to see massive steel structural members and reams of rivets sitting before me, waiting to be turned into high trestles and bridges. My mind lingered over his words as we uncoupled from the train and made our way to the engine terminal where Bullpen would bring the engine into the roundhouse.
“I’m sure it will be something to see,” I told him as we placed our trip reports on File Cabinet’s desk. We walked into the locker room, and as I patted the soot off my jacket, I gave a great big sigh.
“Well now, colt, what’s the matter with you? Seems like a young buck like yourself would be happy about having a better laid stretch of main to fire,” Crosshead said. I watched as he kissed the inside of his locker door. The picture of his family sat there, the image beginning to wear away where his lips touched before and after each run.
“I suppose I am,” I said, wiping the dust from my face. “I just feel bad for Highball and all. I wonder if he’ll ever come back if there’s no Old Main to run on.”
There was a slow squeak as Crosshead closed his locker door. A silence sat around us as he stared down the stretch of lockers.
“You should have stopped thinking about that a long time ago, colt,” Crosshead said, his voice catching.
I stared at the back of his head for a moment. A sigh filled the air, and Crosshead stood and made his way down the line of lockers. When he reached the end, he stopped. He turned his head and looked back at me, loss and pain etched in his features, and then trotted out of the locker room.
I went down on my haunches. Slowly, my head came forward until it rested against my locker door. I sat alone in the silence of the locker room as flakes of soot fell off my hat and bandana, each flake catching in the sun that fell in through the thick, yellowed windows high overhead.
Outside, a switcher engine went past, the blast of its steam buffeting the side of the building and catching me in a momentary darkness as the smoke drifted across the windows.
That’s it then, I thought. I always was the pondering sort, and at that moment I was made to accept the finality of it all. Highball’s gone to pot. Number 3803 is worth little more than scrap. Soon enough, all of the Old Main will just be a strip of weeds. It’s all just so much dust, ain’t it? There’s not much fairness to it. It ain’t fair at all.
I wish that it had ended there, in the locker room. I wish that I had made my peace with the new reality of being a firestallion of the Baltimare & Ohayo Railroad’s Canterlot Division as my head rested against the cold, grey steel of the door.
Months passed, and as they did, I saw less and less of Highball. He became something intangible, a ghost that flitted through the roundhouse, yard office, and union hall. Ponies from all over the railroad swarmed across the yards as the construction began in earnest, but none of them knew anything about the gaunt, old stallion who stepped out of their way and did his best not to make a fuss or be bothered with.
The summer faded to autumn, and as the woodlots and cornfields that ran along the railroad right-of-way took on their distinctive colors, it reminded us that change is the only constant in the world. The last fitful, warm days of autumn found ponies working at bringing the new trackage into reality. Maintenance-of-Way crews, the ponies who actually built and maintained the railroad, worked the black earth until it could be bound in steel and wood. Brightly colored leaves fell across the tools of surveyors, graders, and track workers, draping the glistening steel of the new line in a carpet of gold, red, and orange.
The sun hung around the railyard lazily that autumn, as though gauging the progress of the new construction. Ponies came and went in every possible direction, and the constant clang of steel against steel mixed with the sharp barks of steam engines making up and breaking down work trains even as the railroad continued with the daily schedules. The union and the management had worked out a deal, and I was working all of the hours that I could fill in my quota. It was a fat time, and the crew callers lost a bit of weight as they went out on Sutler Street to call on conductors, engineers, brakeponies, and firestallions.
A particularly beautiful maple leaf had fallen in my face as I walked along, and I gazed upon it as I made my way from the locker room and into the roundhouse proper.
I continued staring at it as I made my way past the sleeping giants. The sounds of slumbering steam engines drifted around me, and light came in from above, casting the interior brickwork into relief, something that only happened at that time of year.
A sound echoed through the roundhouse that froze my blood and made my hooves dance beneath me in my confusion and alarm. Something had clattered to the hard, concrete floor of the roundhouse, and a moan that seemed filled with all the loss in the world soon joined it.
I trotted forward, thinking that perhaps somepony had fallen from an engine, or that some other hurt had befallen a pony. Instead, what I found made my hooves clatter to a standstill, and my jaw fell open in disbelief.
There, hovering in the shadow of a C18a class freight engine, was Highball.
My mouth hung open as I watched him stand there, the stallion trembling slightly and his eyes fixed on nothing. His clipboard sat at his hooves, his inspection sheets tossed about the sooty concrete floor beneath him.
There was a hiss of steam from a nearby bay, and I saw Highball tense and shake again. I backpedalled from the sight, and only then did I understand why he was acting this way.
A steam engine was being taken out of the bay, and the engineer, Time Sheet, was making it ready for another day of service on the work trains. It was wreathed in rust and faded paint, looking very much like the type of engine that was made for the harsh use and constant pounding of such work.
I had to look twice, but I realized soon enough why Highball was hiding amid the mass of the freight engine.
I realized that it was 3803.
The whistle sounded out in a shriek, and my eyes flew back to Highball. I watched him jump as the staccato note of the whistle was left incomplete, nothing like the beautiful tones that he had once coaxed from his graceful lady.
There was a harsh, metallic whir. Highball winced and held his hoof against his chest, a pained look spread across his face. The driving wheels had slipped, and soon the sound of sand being sprayed across the rails met our ears.
“Be kindly…”
I looked at Highball as a few grains of sand tumbled across my hooves. His eyes were still focused away. As steam and soot filled the roundhouse, he seemed to be slipping farther into a darkened dream.
“Damn your eyes, Time Sheet, ease her into it,” I heard him whisper. “Be kindly, I beg of you. Just ease her out.”
The engine began to move, protesting all the way through the tall doors of the bay. I saw glimpses of Bullpen and the other hostlers moving around in stark relief against the sun of the autumn day.
My eyes kept coming back to Highball, back to the old, grey stallion that sat shrinking against the driving wheels of the freight engine. He was hiding… hiding from the reality of the rusted, worn carcass of the engine that had once been his great joy.
“Be kindly,” he repeated, his voice growing dim. “Please, be kindly.”
Behind him, what was once his engine crept out into the autumn day. Her drivers slipped and her stack “coughed” as indifferent hooves went about their work. They could not know what they were doing to a hidden stallion nearby.
Long minutes passed, and soon the whir of the turntable disappeared amid the other sounds of the roundhouse, and the doors of the bay came closed once again.
I stood there as long as I could stand it, looking on the figure of my fallen idol, before I finally approached him.
“Highball?” I asked in my quietest tone.
He started, and a look of supreme embarrassment went across his face. He kicked at his clipboard as though not being able to decide to hide it or pick it up. Soon the look faded, and all that was left was a stallion in pain. His eyes fell to the floor, and then back to me.
“I just… I just want to run trains, is all,” he said in a hushed voice. “It’s what I was meant for. It’s my mark.”
“I know,” I answered. “I know you do.”
He stood there for a moment, wavering on his hooves. He took a few breaths, and each one shuddered through him, as though he was to admitting to himself that he was old, broken… defeated.
I looked at him, and then I gathered up his clipboard. I pressed it into his hooves, but as I did, he seemed to be lost in the motion, both attempting to take it and not.
“I’m supposed to be an engineer.”
I’ll never forget the way he looked at me as he said, the way that all of the loss and hurt in the world hung in his words. He lay there, looking at me with a plea in his eyes that it wasn’t my place to try to answer. Questions sat behind his cool, grey eyes that were beyond my years to ponder.
I tried to pass him the clipboard once more, but instead he moved oddly and stumbled forward. I caught him as he began to fall. I wrapped my hooves around him, supporting him and keeping him from meeting the cold concrete of the roundhouse floor.
“It’s all... all I was meant for…”
His voice trailed off, and in that moment, my longtime idol did the one thing that I had not ever expected of him, that I could not have ever pictured him doing.
He began to cry.
I held him as a life of working the high iron washed out of him, as the dreams of a colt that had sustained him for decades fell from him, and tears stained his coat and kicked up pools of soot and sand where they fell the roundhouse floor.
Around us, the engines breathed in their slumber. The autumn sun fell through the roundhouse, casting itself across locomotives, bricks, and ponies alike.