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Cab over Wheels

That evening, Wilbert had parked his coaches in a siding, and was now in the shed alongside Thomas and Percy. "You two," he said, "are lucky to have a branch line as long as yours."

The man with the white hair looked offended. "Our line isn't that short!" he said. "We've never professed to being anything other than a short branch line." This fellow, in addition to his blue skin, white hair, and yellow eyes, wore a blue suit and top hat, complete with black shoes and a blue top hat.

"It's enough of a challenge to drive as it is, but in a good way," added another voice. A woman had just finished doing some maintenance on Wilbert, and walked round the front. She had yellow ski, blue eyes, and red hair, and wore a blue shirt with dark blue overalls, combined with brown boots and a green hairband in her hair.

"Ah!" the man said. "I'm Sam Seldon, but you can call me Sunny Skies. I'm the general manager at the Dean Forest, and this here is my chief engineer, Torque Wrench!"

"Tara Weldon," the woman replied. "I've worked the Dean Forest for years. It's a tough old route, with steep gradients and quite a few sudden changes in speed. You also need to keep a close eye on the greenery, especially around Whitecroft where the trees get very close to the line."

"I'll be sure to ask Kerfuffle to look at it when we get back," Sunny smiled. Seeing the confusion on the engine's faces, he explained. "Kerfuffle is the head of our track maintenance department."

This prompted another person to introduce themselves, another woman, this time with light blue skin and wild pink hair, into which a strange pendant was placed. She wore a blue shirt with a yellow fuzz jacket atop that, and whilst one of her legs was a natural leg, the other was half metal. "Hi!" she said. "I'm Kate, or Kerfuffle if you prefer."

Thomas decided not to ask about her prosphetic limb, thinking it innapropriate to ask such questions.

"Sunny, I've got us all a place to stay whilst we're here!" called another voice. One more person walked over, carefully navigating the working areas. She was a woman with purple skin and very elaborately done up dark purple hair. Her blue eyes seemed to glow in the dim light of the shed, and she wore dark purple heels, as well as a purple short sleeved dress with a ruffled top part and a wide, ankle length skirt. "There's a nice bed and breakfast just down the road from here, and they do breakfast as well!"

"That does sound good!" Sunny Skies smiled, as he glanced over. "This is Petunia Petals, company historian and archivist." Percy could've sworn he saw both of them blush when they looked at each other, but chose to say nothing.

"Now then," said Thomas, "I hear one of your jobs is to shunt trucks at the mine near Ffarquhar. There's a sign there that says 'Danger! Engines must not pass this Board', or 'this Point', depending on what day of the week it is. You must obey this sign, as I didn't one time and fell down a mineshaft!"

Wilbert noted this. "I was built to work in a colliery," he pointed out. "I know all about places that are out of bounds to engines. One engine I know didn't, however."

"Please do tell us!" Percy said.

Torque Wrench stepped forward. "Perhaps it's best that I tell the story," she said. "This happened a long time ago, in a place I used to work before coming to the Dean Forest. It was a wet and rainy day..."


Bickershaw Colliery, Lancashire


Warrior was a most conceited engine. He was an austerity, fairly typical fair for a colliery railway, and was painted in the colliery's house livery of red with yellow lining, as well as black and yellow hazard stripes on his front and rear bufferbeams. One of his many jobs at the colliery was moving the waste materials, called slag, to the waste tip, where it would get dumped into huge piles resembling mountains. Engines always had to stop in specific locations to ensure the slag heap would get filled properly.

"Why must we always stop in the same place?" he asked Torque Wrench, as she got him ready to collect another load of waste.

"Because it's for safety reasons," Torque Wrench replied. "The board is there to prevent an engine or train running away. If we pass the board, who knows where we'll end up?"

Warrior said nothing, but the wet weather and slippery rails had given him an idea. During the first shipment of waste to the slag tip, it happened. Warrior was reversing down the grade to the stopping point, but he had made a fatal error. He only had brakes that worked on the engine, not the trucks, and the wet rails made it very difficult for the brakes to grip properly. The trucks slammed into each other, knocking Warrior backwards and onto a steep downhill grade, causing him to slide past the board and stop several feet beyond it.

"Fantastic," Torque Wrench said. "We've stopped past the board." She let the brakes off, started the sanding gear, and tried to move the trucks forward, but Warrior's wheels slipped furiously on the wet rails, and the heavy trucks held them in place.

"What are you two doing there?" shouted a foreman.

"These trucks shoved us here!" Warrior protested.

Torque Wrench had her suspicions, but chose not to voice them. "I misjudged the stopping distance and we skidded past the board."

"Get to level ground! That embankment's not designed to take an engine's weight!"

"What do you think I'm doing?"

But it was too late. A rush of stones poured away from the embankment, and the rails began to dip. "That doesn't look good," Warrior said.

Torque Wrench tried one last time to get him moving, but it was too late. She jumped for safety as the embankment collapsed completely, and Warrior fell sideways into the slag heap, landing with a crash and lying on his side. "Ouch."

"We can't get a crane to him yet, but we need to stabilise the earthworks, or else the tip will collapse," Torque Wrench pointed out. "We don't want another Aberfan, after all."


Knapford Sheds, Present Day


Thomas and Percy were silent. "What happened?" Thomas ventured.

Wilbert smiled. "Warrior was eventually recovered, but they didn't fix him, and dumped him at the back of the shed."

"Is he still there?" Percy asked.

"Nope," Torque Wrench replied. "Bickershaw Colliery closed in the 1990s, and he was bought by the Dean Forest Railway and restored to working order. Safe to say, he has learned his lesson."

Author's Note:

The original engine in Cab over Wheels is referred to only as 16 in the story, but I made a tweak to this and decided to use the engine's real life identity and location for the accident (Bickershaw Colliery in Lancashire). Curiously, the engine in question is preserved at the Dean Forest and is currently awaiting overhaul. Torque Wrench briefly references the Aberfan Disaster, a spoil tip collapse that turned into a landslide and buried a Welsh village.

Indeed, the new humans added are from the 2019 special Rainbow Roadtrip, which I know not everybody has seen, but I will try to give enough context so you can understand what's going on between them.

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