TRAVEL BY RAIL
Chapter 4
"So, just what kind of dragon are you?" The brown one with the white hair, which Adam thought was Caboose, said.
The question drew Adam’s attention away from the receding ground and towards the rapidly receding track. Adam didn’t know how to answer the creature’s question.
Where did they get the dragon part? Dragon’s don’t even exist!
“Well, that’s an interesting question,” Adam replied, avoiding the question altogether until he could formulate an answer.
While he was thinking of an answer, the alerter rang again, breaking his train of thought. Adam pressed the acknowledge button to silence it, and sighed. Knowing no other place to start, Adam began to talk about his race.
“Well, for one, I’m not a dragon,” Adam began.
Adam was about to continue when the Caboose one interrupted him, “You’re not a dragon?”
Adam, who thought his whole day was a massive hallucination, looked annoyed at the interruption, but continued anyway, “no, I’m not; I’m a human.”
Adam never thought he would ever have to say that line ever; the alien thought sent a shiver down his spine.
“A human? I’ve never heard of a human before,” Caboose commented. The other three miniature horses didn’t say anything as Caboose continued after a short pause, “you look enough like a dragon, walking on two legs and have claws.”
“Uh, well, definitely a human here,” Adam replied nervously replied; this whole conversation was getting really awkward for him. Trying to gain the upper hand in the conversation, he volleyed a question to the only talkative creature, “what are you anyway? I’ve never seen any horses like you before.”
Caboose didn’t respond for a few seconds, then said, “uh, I’m not a horse, I’m a pony!”
Adam deadpanned, “close enough.”
“Not really, horses are just fiction; they aren’t real,” Caboose retorted. The comment puzzled Adam.
How can they have ponies but no horses? Adam thought.
A silence permeated through the cab for several minutes, with only the alerter breaking the quiet atmosphere.
Looking in their direction of travel, Adam noticed that the scenery was changing: the hoodoos which had cropped up when he apparently teleported here were getting shorter, and the outside temperature was cooler.
“I need you to tell me when to stop,” Adam said to the silent cab.
A long pause as Adam's sentence sunk into the ponies.
“What?” Was the reply from the cab, “You mean we going faster than any right-minded pony should travel and you don’t know when to stop?”
Adam could tell by the voice that it wasn’t Caboose. Looking backwards to where the three ponies stood, Adam noticed that of the three, the tan and gray one looked particularly incensed. It was John Bull.
"Uh, what did you expect? To putter along with that guy sitting knocked out over there?"
"No, but I didn't expect to set any land speed records!"
"What land speed record? We're barely going 70 miles an hour!"
"I made the land speed record ba-"
"I don't know what we're yelling about!"
A long minute of silence followed Evening Star's outburst.
"What's a 'mile' anyway?" Evening Star pondered.
After a pause, "it's a unit of length, five thousand two hundred eighty feet," Adam responded. He had a feeling this might go on for a while.
"Uh, how long is a feet?"
Adam sighed silently as his feeling was confirmed. Holding up his hands to demonstrate, he said to Evening Star, "A foot is about this much."
Evening Star put his hoof to his chin in concentration. Looking at his hoof, he exclaimed, "so, one 'foot' is about 3 hoofs."
A pause, then, "That would mean there's about three and a third 'feet' per length," Evening Star concluded, paused for a minute, then muttered in thought, "that means with one thousand lengths per glide, that means one glide is about two-thirds of one of your miles!" Evening Star's enthusiasm crescendoed at the end upon his realization.
Two-thirds of a mile? That sounds a lot like a kilometer, Adam thought, then corrected himself when he realized that they weren't kilometers here, they were these funky 'glides'. And with one thousand lengths per glide, that sounds like a meter. What did they do to the metric system?
After running a few short comparisons in his head, Adam blurted out, "I need one of you to go on the roof and tell me when we get within four glides of 'Ponyville.'"
The three conscious ponies looked at him like he was an alien. Wait a minute, he was an alien to them, nevermind. Crazy is a better word for it.
"You're crazy!" One of them exclaimed.
"If one of you don't, I won't know when to stop, putting the recovery of your friend off while I back the train up, as well as putting the lives of innocent people in danger," Adam tried to reason with the ponies.
After a pause, Caboose spoke up, "We couldn't do it from in here? We're still about 10 glides away."
"Well, um, maybe until we get close to 5 glides. The whole train that way," Adam pointed towards the rear of the train, "Is over 500 meters, er, lengths that way."
The ponies seemed flabbergasted that such a thing could exist.
"Over 500 lengths? That's impossible, nothing in Equestria would be able to pull something like that." Caboose exclaimed.
"Yeah, and weighing in at about 5000 tons, it takes a while to stop. That's why I need someone to spot for me, so I know when I need to start slowing down the train and I don't overshoot the town," Adam explained.
"How long does it take to slow down the train?" Evening Star asked.
"Well, I would say about... 3 glides as an estimate," Adam replied.
All the pony's eyes widened at the information. A moment later, the alerter went off startling the ponies, and Adam quickly shut it off.
Looking backwards again, Adam noticed that they were rapidly approaching the end of the desert; the dividing barrier a huge mountain range. "Can't you just keep that thing off?"
"Please tell me there isn't a pass to go over," Adam asked, changing the subject before he had to explain about the regulations.
"Um, no there isn't one. There's no way we'd be able to get over a mountain," one of the ponies said.
Slinking quickly towards the approaching mountains, Adam felt trepidation; he had no idea if his train was within the loading gauge of the tunnel or not. If it didn't, everyone would be royally screwed: the train would have enough energy that it would accordion into itself, potentially derailing the locomotives and the train following and severely injuring everyone. From his seat in the cab, he saw eye to eye with the smokestack of the pony's engine. Not good news, as the roof of his locomotive was 3 feet above his head.
"Hey, um, how tall is the roof of the tunnel?" Adam asked frantically, hoping to prevent another disaster from happening today.
"It's just large enough for the train to get through. Don't worry though, it was bored by the finest unicorns in Equestria after all, the company wouldn't settle for less." the white one, John Bull explained, as if it answered all the questions in the world.
Incidentally, it only raised more for Adam. "Wait, you said unicorns? As in magic and that sort of crap?"
"Well, I wouldn't call it crap necessarily, but yeah, they used their magic to make the tunnel."
"We have a problem then, my train is larger than your train." Adam said as he reached forward to apply the train brakes.
A shout rang through the cab, making everyone look towards its source, "WAIT!"
Caboose blushed a little at the attention before continuing, "You need to go faster, The unicorns bored it yes, but unicorn tunnels have safeties in them for over sized carriages and the likes. If you go fast enough, it might fit the entirety of your train."
Adam had almost pushed the brakes out of the lap position and into apply when Caboose had shouted. Putting it back into release, Adam briefly scanned the instrument panel, looking for the switch that would allow the locomotive to give the normally-rated 4000 horsepower locomotives an extra 400 horsepower. Finding what he was looking for, he flipped the switch. The light that should have come on to signify the extra engine output did not come on. Adam toggled it a few times to see it it truly wasn't working; it wasn't working. "Hand me my backpack," He almost shouted at the ponies, "there's no time to waste!"
Scrambling quickly, they flung the bag at Adam who caught it deftly. Unzipping it and reaching into it, he procured a roll of yellowed masking tape. Tearing off a short one-inch strip, he stuck it to the switch and set it to the 4000 horsepower position. "Here's the deal," he said to the three conscious ponies, "I have to re-start the engine in order to get more power. When I tell you to, flip the switch that I marked with tape, OK?"
With that, Adam dashed out of his seat, flung the cab door open, and ran down the side of the locomotive. When he got to the middle, he swung open the side panel, gaining access to the engine controls. Adam pressed the shutdown button and waited for the engine to stop spinning.
All the while, the mountain was getting closer and closer. Adam could see the tunnel portal creeping to meet his train as he looked around the side of the freight cars. The engine was still spinning, having slowed down to about half speed. Adam's anxiety was slowly creeping up on him: he was somehow transported into a foreign world, had an accident and injured someone, and finally speeding towards a tunnel that wasn't large enough to fit his train instead of doing the smart thing and stopped. Also, the engine still hadn't stopped.
"Are you ready to flip the switch!?" Adam shouted to the pony, Evening Star, sitting in the engineer's chair.
"What?" Was the faint reply, the pony's voice being drowned out by the still-running locomotive behind him.
"Are you ready!?" Adam yelled harder, hoping that Evening Star could hear him this time.
"I can't hear you!" was the reply, along with a shrug by the new engineer.
"Flip the switch!" Adam shouted back, waving his arms around, hoping that the pony would get the idea.
Evening Star understood, and looked for the switch with the tape on it. After a few moments of searching, Evening Star gave up, and shouted back at Adam, "The tape is missing!"
"I can't hear you! Shout louder!"
"I! Can't! Find! It!"
Adam's brows knitted together in frustration. Slamming the access panel, he ran into the cab. Leaning over Evening Star, who hadn't gotten out of the chair, had to duck down to avoid Adam's hands as he quickly flipped the power setting switch and pushed the reverser into neutral and the throttle to notch 1. Flying out of the cab once more, he wrenched the panel open and pressed the start button. Shutting the panel again he ran into the cab as the engine wound up to idle. The train was at speed already so he didn't have to worry about starting up slowly, so he put the reverser back into reverse and the throttle up to notch 8. The light on the switch had finally lit up.
"If the buzzer rings again, press this button," Adam quickly explained to Evening Star, who was still in the chair, then took off out of the cab once more. This time running down the full length of the locomotive, he jumped off the end towards the second power unit. It was at this point that a joint in the rail passed underneath the train, making the locomotives shift, causing Adam to slip on the running board of the second locomotive. Landing face-down halfway on and off the running board, he could see the ground speeding along a few feet from his body.
Call it his adrenaline-pumped brain, or maybe fate or luck, but something caused him to look towards the end of the train just in time to see the tunnel portal come rushing up to him. Scrambling for purchase on the metal diamond-plate platform, he was able to pull his head in just in time for darkness to overcome his world.
Shaking from the adrenaline, he reached out for the locomotive door's handle, twisted it open and gained access into the unused cab. Finding his prize, he flipped the power switch, waiting for the inevitable moment when it wouldn't come on. A moment's pause and the light came on.
Still shaking, Adam collapsed into the chair, exhausted. A minute of rest and a bitter, chilly wind swirling around the cab from the open door stirred him. Quivering, Adam got up and made his way down the stairwell to the control locomotive.