Chapter 7: Platform Nine and Three Quarters
“Platform Nine. Platform Ten. Your platform should be somewhere in the middle, but they don’t seem to have built it yet,” Vernon observed, while Harry watched a fairly large crowd of funny-haired children- they were walking into the station from outside, with wheeled luggage, owls, and everything- vanish into the solid metal barrier between platforms. “Have a good term.”
He watched the Dursleys leave, jeering at him as they drove away, then looked forwards at the barrier, and shrugged. He had a pretty good idea of where he was going.
Though there was at least a part of him that wished there was a door convenient for someone to slam in his face. He hadn’t tried that at the Dursleys; the lot of them had been too scared of him to get close, so he hadn’t asked. He rather liked how nobody went nuts about Hailey, even though everyone in Diagon Alley and beyond had gone basically nuts at him whenever they realized who he was before he had turned himself into a girl.
At first, he’d thought the transformation would only last a few hours… but it held for the entire rest of the day, and he’d had to go to sleep as a girl at the Dursleys once again… and woken up to find himself a boy again. The Dursleys hadn’t said anything.
He pushed his trolley forwards, towards the barrier. He’d let it ‘rest’ against the barrier, then push against it, to see if that’s what it took without risking crashing if he was wrong.
He slowed down as he got close, and then-
The moment it touched, the barrier was nowhere, and he was instead facing a wide open platform crowded with funny-haired children and the occasional normal-looking family. There was a scarlet steam engine with a very long train behind it, but Harry couldn’t read the side through the crowd. As he walked forwards, he glanced back up at the wrought iron archway he’d passed through- which announced that he was indeed on Platform Nine and Three Quarters.
He gave a nod and pushed his trolly to the train, hunting for an empty compartment.
It didn’t take him very long. He put Hedwig into his selected compartment first, then started struggling with his trunk.
He had only dropped it painfully on his foot once before a couple of girls appeared. “Would you like some help with that?” one asked, her hair split between bright pink and dark blue.
“Yes please,” he answered.
“Okay then… so how heavy is it?” She squatted down, seized the other end of the trunk, and lifted. “Hmm…” She straightened up. “You’ve got a heavy one.” She looked at Harry. “We can drag it in, but in order to get it into the luggage rack, we’ll all have to work together. Diamond?”
The other girl nodded, and as Harry stood back, they took positions on either side of his trunk, lifted it, and dragged it into the train. He followed them in.
The girl was right. It did take all three of them to get it into the rack.
“That’s going to be a pain to get back down,” Harry muttered, looking up at it.
The girl nodded. “Yup.”
The other girl- Diamond Tiara, if he recalled correctly- nodded. “I’ll get the trolley,” she volunteered, and left, closing the door behind her.
The first girl heaved a sigh. “Whelp.” She held out her hand for him to shake. “I’m Bonbon, and it’s nice to meet you, Harry.”
He took the offered hand. “Nice to meet you too,” he muttered.
The girl took a deep breath. “Well, I have something of a proposal,” she began, in a very official tone of voice. “We have an… agreement with the Hogwarts Headmaster, in that we’re allowed to set up a student instructor program so that the few instructors that they have at the school will be able to teach the sudden influx of thousands this year. Naturally, we’ve picked and vetted a lot of our instructors- but believe it or not, you’re a candidate, though not…” She sighed. “It’s complicated, actually. We’ve got enough instructors that you’d be more of a backup or control, if you agree- the same instruction and everything as the other instructors… but no class to teach. There is a possibility that, if we have to fire an instructor, you could be given an assignment at some point in the year. Do you think that’s something you might be interested in?” She looked at him inquisitively.
Harry mulled it over for a few seconds. “It’s not because I’m famous, is it?” he asked bluntly.
She blinked. “You’re famous? Huh. News to me. And no, it’s not- it’s based mostly on Diamond’s evaluation.”
“Huh,” he muttered. “Alright, I’ll bite. Tell me more?”
It was nearly half an hour after Harry got on the train when Bonbon reappeared in the door to the compartment. She’d fully explained that program, and he’d agreed- even offered to let them use his compartment for the ‘student instructor course’ she warned him they’d need to give him before he arrived at the school. Once they reached the school, his actually becoming a student instructor would be contingent upon his having passed the instructor course.
He looked up when the door slid open. Bonbon wasn’t alone; she had a second girl with her now, with bushy brown hair.
“Harry, this is Hermione Granger,” Bonbon began. “Hermione, this is Harry Potter. You’ve both elected to be a part of our student instructor program, and we intend to use this compartment for the associated lesson. Hermione, is it going to be okay if we put your luggage in here, or do you want it somewhere else?”
Hermione, whose eyes had snapped to Harry’s when his name was mentioned, looked at Bonbon. “I assume we’ll be taking turns getting dressed?”
Bonbon nodded. “I would assume that too. Probably wait in the corridor or something.”
Harry shrugged. “Or you could slam a door in my face and it wouldn’t matter,” he smiled.
Bonbon gave him a weird look, but otherwise ignored his comment.
Hermione, on the other hand, looked at him with a perplexing expression on her face. “Yeah,” she muttered, slowly. “That’ll be fine by me. What about you, Harry?”
Harry shrugged again. “No problem here.”
“Alright.” Hermione looked at Bonbon, who nodded silently before they both disappeared.
It didn’t take them long to reappear, dragging a trunk that looked somewhat larger than Harry’s- and with Diamond’s help as well. The three of them stopped to catch their breaths once they got it in the compartment.
Harry stood up. “Would you like some help?” he asked.
Bonbon nodded. “Yup. And I thought yours was heavy. I think she’s got half a library in here.”
Hermione blushed. “I do not! I only got twelve extra books!”
Harry laughed, but took a position with the trunk anyways, to help lift it into the luggage rack. “Ready?”
The driver pushed the throttle a little bit further forwards. It was already much further than he’d pushed it before, and the train had shifted slightly when the brakes released, so he knew he wasn’t fighting those- but his locomotive had yet to move anywhere. He leaned out the side of the train to look at the wheels. They weren’t moving.
So he pushed it a little further, checking the pressure gauge on the locomotive. Full pressure.
Still nothing happened, so he pushed it a touch further again.
He got a response. The locomotive vibrated, but didn’t move forwards, despite the chuffing. He looked out again. The wheels were spinning in place.
He rolled his eyes, reduced the throttle until the wheels stopped spinning, and leaned out with his wand this time. He cast a quick spell to make the wheels incapable of slipping- it was incredibly useful during the winter, when the tracks could be layered with ice- and started pushing the throttle forwards.
He pushed it, slowly, while leaning out the side of the locomotive… then, at right about eighty percent of maximum throttle, he got a response again. And again, it wasn’t the one he was looking for.
The wheels weren’t slipping, though. His spell was doing its job.
Instead, he had put down so much power that the whole locomotive was rearing up.
His wand flashed forwards, and he forced the front of the locomotive back to the ground.
The conductor reached past him while he continued nudging the throttle forwards to launch an owl with a letter, probably to Dumbledore to warn him that the train was going to be late. “Do you think she’s going to go anywhere?”
“Perhaps,” the driver- a muggleborn, who actually had worked for a muggle railroad for a short time before the Ministry approached him with this job- muttered. “The train’s much too heavy for her. We might get it moving, but we aren’t going to be moving very quickly.” He sighed. “What we really need- and I told them we’d need it- is more locomotives.” The throttle reached ninety percent, but nothing happened. He kept pushing it.
“Would a featherweight charm work?”
“No, that’d just cause a derailment. I think it’s the weight of all the students that pushed it over the- Ahh, there we go!” At what had to be about ninety-five percent of maximum throttle, the locomotive had finally started moving. He continued nudging it higher, trying to get the acceleration rate up to what it was supposed to be, but hit maximum throttle before it got there. He sighed. “Maximum throttle. And whenever we start hitting the hills, we’re going to be stuck with whatever speed our emergency spells can give us, because she won’t be going up.” He was referring to a set of spells that had been designed to keep the train moving in the event that the locomotive broke down- which had happened depressingly often in the early days, but hadn’t happened for nearly thirty years.
The driver sat down on the catwalk on the side of the locomotive once again, listening to the sluggish thudding of the cylinders while he mopped the sweat off his brow. “Does Dumbledore know?” he asked the conductor. At least the magic was keeping the steam from cooling inside the cylinders, so he didn’t have to lose power by opening those valves. And for as little power as the locomotive could provide on its own, it was reducing the amount of magic he and the conductor had to keep dumping into it to keep it moving up the gradient.
The conductor nodded mutely, wand pointed at the drive wheels as he forced them to keep turning.
Then he looked up, down the tracks. There was a curve ahead, and-
He let out a sigh of relief. “We’re saved,” he muttered.
The locomotives rounding the curve ahead were not familiar to him, aside from being even more complicated muggle technology that he hadn’t been trained on, but there were twelve of them and they only had one car, right in the middle. They were also as silent as a ghost as they approached- despite the heat waves visible off the tops.
The conductor looked up too. “What in the name of Merlin is that?” he asked.
“Backup,” the driver told him. The things definitely weren’t intended for passenger service- but right at that moment, he didn’t care. All he cared was that there was someone standing on the catwalk on the front of the nearest locomotive (they seemed to have a somewhat random orientation, and from what he remembered, they were also better capable of backing up than his). And of course, that someone was using something in his hand to control them.
Finally, the twelve massive locomotives drew to a halt a short distance in front of the Hogwarts Express.
The driver stepped up to the front of the locomotive, even though it was going to be his turn at the drive wheels in a minute or so. “Are you here to save us?” he asked.
The man on the larger locomotive chuckled. “Yes, actually. We saw you crawling on satellite photos, and brought these in to see our students safely to Hogwarts. So…” He shrugged, and looked down. “What’s the pull spec on your front coupler?”
“Every bit of this train has been magically reinforced,” the driver answered, shaking his head. “It’s theoretically unbreakable.”
“Nice.” He looked down, in time for the couplers to clack together. The Hogwarts Express gave a little shudder as it pushed the larger locomotives to match its speed; they must not have had the brakes engaged. Then he looked back up. “Shall we get rolling, then?”
He nodded. “Yes please. We’ve got about five hours to cover nearly four hundred miles as it is.”
He scowled, raising his thing to his mouth. “Light ‘er up,” he commanded, then he lowered it. “Well, we’re not going to be able to make that kind of speed, but we can definitely get you there faster than this.”
Right as the man finished speaking, the massive locomotives each let out deep, basso growls that grew heavier and stronger for a second before the train started picking up speed.
“I’m… curious,” Hermione began, slowly. They’d both just passed the student instructor course- which hadn’t started until after the train had started moving, and had started with Harry and Hermione taking turns getting changed with the others waiting outside- with flying colors.
Twilight Sparkle, one of the instructors for the student instructor course, looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Mm?”
“What made you pick me?” Hermione asked. “For this, I mean.”
Bonbon shrugged. “You were the one that made us realize there were candidates amongst the British students as well,” she told her. “After that, it was a slam dunk. And the final evaluation was at the end of our course, just in case we were wrong with our preliminary evaluations, but…” She shrugged. “Flying colors.” She looked down at her clipboard. “As a matter of fact, I actually wasn’t aware that it was possible to do as well as you did.”
Hermione blushed scarlet.
Twilight nodded, peering at the clipboard as well. “Literally the one hundredth percentile. Even across all three thousand other instructors- a good ninety-five percent of which are much older and more experienced, and several of which are certified instructors where we come from. Hay, even I didn’t do as well!” She laughed good-naturedly.
Hermione’s blush darkened.
Right at that moment, there was a knock on the door. Bonbon slid it open.
It was a red-haired boy, about Harry’s age. “Do you mind if I join you?” he began, almost as soon as the door was fully open. “Everywhere else is full.” Then he blinked at the full compartment. “Er…”
“No worries,” Bonbon said, as she, Lyra, Twilight, Luna, Sunset Shimmer, and Starlight Glimmer stood up. “We were about ready to return to our compartment anyways.” She looked back at Harry and Hermione. “Is it okay if he joins you?”
Harry shrugged.
Hermione blinked. “Uh, sure,” she muttered. “There’s only… two hours or so left.”
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Ooh, nice chapter!!
Also...Order of the Phoe-nix! Order of the Phoe-nix! Order of the Phoe-nix!
Can you tell that's my favorite book of the series?
Would it no have been that sarcastic from Vernon, his good bye would actually have been unusal nice.
Is that Discord, coming by the rails?
Did I miss where Harry and Hermione got chosen to try for student teacher? That really seemed to come out of nowhere.
Um. Who the heck was driving those extra locomotives that they had access to real time satellite imaging? The wizarding society is too dismissive of muggles to even know what muggle technology is capable of in the vast majority of cases, and the Ministry are the worst of the lot for that. But the ponies just arrived... that’s some seriously fast negotiation to have sufficient contacts and pull with muggle governments to have access to, again, real time satellite imaging feeds! (Everything we civilians get from Google, etc is generally years out of date before we see it!)
One eternity later...
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Harry's recruitment happened this chapter, Hermione's was off-screen.
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What happened?
They made the news. Then muggle governments that knew about wizards already (because with modern tech you really can’t hide it), so those muggle governments sent a train crew or whatever…
Theres tricks to get heavy trains moving that are only used for freight because of how passIengers react to the procedure.
If the years are being used as in the books, then closest I can find to what I origionally thought would be an EWS 66 class freight monster, is instead Class 60. Can only do 60 mph, but has a Lot of weight, and even more hauling power. Wwierdly, its braking is junk, relying on the distributed braking of the train. Saviour Locomotives?
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The years are 30 after the books- meaning that this scene took place in 2021.
But yes, it is very possible they used (at least similar) locomotives- and pretty definite they used freight locomotives because that’s what they had enough of…
Also, ANY locomotive relies on the distributed braking effect for true braking. If it just locked up its own wheels at the head of a heavy train going down a hill, all it’d manage to do would be to generate flat spots on the wheels.
Sweet Celestia! There is someone who can out-nerd our egg-head!
Nice. Wish I could see Hermione find out about Hailey. Is it bad that i hope the two of them end up in a relationship, and Harry sleeps in the girls dorm as Hailey cuddled up with Hermione?
I like the crossovers where the main character of the franchise isn't made irrelevant by some arbitrary supporting character that happened to be the fanfic writer's favourite. Maybe doing more with Harry might lead you to less dead ends.
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Me too.
Unfortunately, it’s also the easy way to go. The bigger and more important the character in the original work, the harder they are to write convincingly. I’ve taken a bit of an easy-out on that front, by defining him by an inconsistency in the original rather than by the overall original work, but it does let me keep Harry relevant, doesn’t it?
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No, I don’t think it’s bad. I mean…
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Probably
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Not just AUs. It's a good rule for all fanfiction.
Readers are intuitively drawn to works where they can sense that there are causal connections more significant than "Chaos theory. Something something butterfly." so, if you're starting from a universe that has already had time to establish itself in prior works, it's best to think of it as "You get one free 'poke from the author's finger' and then everything else should ripple out from that".
I always thought that the wizards need a new train. Diesel trains are more energy efficient, not necessarily more powerful. Muggles understood that. But if the steam locomotives from the 40s can't pull your heavy load then you are in serious trouble.
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In general, Diesel-Electric are also about twice as powerful as steam. That said, it is not all that hard to build a steam loco that'll outperform the diesel- they did it a few times, and the Big Boy- as the most powerful steam locomotive ever produced in the US at least- is on par with some of the heavy-hauler diesels such as might have come to perform rescue.
The challenge is that diesel locomotives involve computers and other, higher technology than steam, so the wizards wouldn't understand it at all...
Aite lets analyze this train.
The bluebell preservation society has nice diagrams of the interiors of some of their coaches. I CBA to find the exact coaches used in the Harry Potter films, but with a quick inspection there's three designs used at minimum: a brake coach of some description, an open coach, and a composite corridor of some description. I'll use the figures from the Bluebell Railway Historical Society since they're simple to get at:
Bluebell 35207 - Corridor Brake Second seats 24 and luggage; 31 tons tare
Bluebell 16210 Corridor Composite seats 48; 35.5 tons tare
Bluebell 4957 Second Open seats 64; 33 tons tare
All three have a length when coupled of 66'2.5".
I do not know if the weight figures are in long tons or tonnes, so I will assume long tons.
So what's the composition of a train? It's not known. I assume the hogwarts express didn't start using the standard opens just in OOTP, so they are likely present in other years. With trains of various lengths. I'll make the assumption that for every 5 cars there's one brake, two corridor, and two open cars. For every 5 car cut, there is:
- One luggage compartment
- Seating for 120 students
- Tare weight of 168 tons
- Passenger weight of 5.3 tons*
- Overall length of 331'0.5"
So with all these assumptions documented, what can we expect from the 2021 Hogwarts Express?
- 542 cars are necessary to transport the student body
- The train's length will be 35,862' or 6.79 miles, discounting the locomotive
- The train will weigh 18,211 tons
- The student body will weigh an additional 580 tons*
- The total weight of the train will be 18,791 tons
*For consistency, the 650 tons figure has been converted from short tons to long tons
What kind of trains does this compare to?
The record-breaking longest train was set by BHP in Australia and amassed a total 682 ore cars stretching 4.5 miles with a total weight of 89,048 long tons and necessitated 8 locomotives strategically distributed throughout the train to prevent the pulling forces from overwhelming the material strength of the couplers.
More comparable in weight to Hogwarts Express 2021 is a notable run from Union Pacific of the United States amassing 296 intermodal cars stretching 3.8 miles and weighing in at 12,552 long tons. This train used 9 distributed locomotives to drive the train up to 70 miles per hour.
The BHP train used 8 AC6000CW which clock in at 166,000 lbf of tractive** effort for a power-to-weight ratio 14.9 lbf/ton. The UP train used 9 AC45CCTE (commonly known as GEVO) locomotives have the same tractive effort as the AC6000CW, which give the train a power-to-weight ratio of 119 lfb/ton. The BHP train did not need to run at speed like the UP train, which explains the difference in tractive effort per ton of the two trains.
How does the hall stack up to 8 or 9 diesel electrics? Not too well unfortunately. With a tractive effort of 27,275 lbf, its ratio is a mere 1.45 lbf/ton.
**Diesel electric tractive effort has its peak at standstill and tapers off at speed - these values are continuous tractive effort
What can the 12 locomotives do to assist the Hogwarts Express? Lets take a look at some options:
- Class 66: 58,500 lbf
- Class 68: 71,000 lbf
- Class 70: 94,180 lbf
(Note that a Big Boy locomotive has a tractive effort of 135,375 lbs)
Because the rescue locomotives were placed at the head of the train as opposed to distributing them throughout the train as is necessary to keep buff and draft forces in check, they will have to be magically reinforced. The chain couplings standard on British Rail stock are significantly weaker than the "buckeye" knuckle couplers used in the BHP and UP trains, and the locomotives will snap the chain couplings handily if they (and the locomotive frames themselves) aren't magically strengthened. With 12 Class 70 locomotives plus the Hall class, the power-to-weight ratio is a somewhat more favorable 87.9 lbf/ton, but they aren't going to match the 70 mph figure of the UP train with that power-to-weight ratio.
Although this not founded in any science, since the performance of a train does not hinge solely on its total tractive effort, lets assume that the ratio of power-to-weight ratio to operating speed is constant, such that a power-to-weight ratio of 119 lbf/ton equals 70 mph. With the 12 Class 70 locomotives and Hall class, the train will move at a brisk 51 mph - a fair bit slower than the 80 mph required to keep the schedule - and will require 8 hours to complete the 400-mile journey.
As far as what the public at large things, since it appears the statue of secrecy has been more-or-less abandoned, here is a news report regarding the UP train which complains about the increased-length train. Railfans lined the tracks when word got out to capture the behemoth train. There would be people arguing that Britain should take the title for longest train in the world, since the entire thing is apparently visible by camera. People who keep their ears to the ground would set up cameras to record the train with their digital equipment where their eye fails them. Relief locomotives for the relief locomotives may have to be dispatched due to limited fuel, or fuel trucks may have to be dispatched to refuel the locomotives in-situ. Anyone stuck behind crossing gates will have to wait 8 minutes for the train to go by assuming it is moving at 51 mph. This is a considerable amount of time to be sure, and will cause delays all across the network which could take days or weeks to resolve. Do you love the rail replacement bus? You might prefer it compared to what can happen with scheduling tie-ups thanks to the over-length train. TOCs and Network Rail will try to go after Hogwarts or the ministry for lost revenue stemming from the delays caused.
So there's some food for thought. I spent way too long writing this.
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I’m not sure what the difference is between those coaches, but FYI, I’m not using the movie as a reference, and the book makes them sound like compartment cars (see a blog post I made for one of the earlier iterations) with airplane-style overhead luggage racks in each. This likely has little or no effect on your calculations, though, since fill per car (rather than capacity) is probably consistent.
Interesting to know with the couplers. I’m only familiar with the knuckle couplers, being in the USA, so that’s what these are behaving like…
You may have noticed there was an extra car right in the middle of the savior locomotives. That’s supposed to be a diesel tender, to extend their range; I don’t know if a comparable car exists in reality, and expect that even if it does, it likely can’t serve twelve locomotives at once. Speaking of, it’s interesting that my ballpark figure (for no. of locos required) was so close…. For speed, the heavy hauling freight locomotives I was thinking of (which were, to be fair, American) top out at 60mph or thereabouts, hence the conductor’s comment.
Hopefully, the wizarding line prefers bridges to grade crossings, rather conveniently reducing delays!
I'm guessing they used featherweight spells on the train just to get it to the station but didn't account for the weight of the passengers and cargo.
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Then you realize the total students & luggage weighs about as much as the normal Hogwarts Express does…. Basically nothing, to a train.
11078845
that's dangerous. the carts will be too light and prone to derail.