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This story is a sequel to Interview with a Cab Driver
While Spuds doesn’t always enjoy travel for the sake of it, the ponies he meets along the way often make it worth it, and this trip is no exception. The trip up the hill is in a creaky superannuated combine with the entire car to himself, but at the summit one of the railroaders from the helper climbs aboard the coach, and she’s got a story to tell.
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Buttons on her butt. Nice.
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Man, if someone named "Stumpy", told me to slow down and be careful, I'd like to think that I'd give a moment's thought to how they learned that lesson themselves...
Is it a story telling? Spuds, buddy, you could write an entire book of short stories from the train yard.Granted, at some point you'd cross the line from journalist to folklorist, and possibly into hippopology.
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Butt-ons.
10974498 Back before the coupler standardization, there used to be 'pins' that went through the link-and-pin couplers to hold the cars together. Since there were so many different kinds of couplers, there were all kinds of weird pins that developed (see here for a quick lesson). When a railroad manager would look for an experienced brakeman, he looked for missing fingers because the longer you worked as a brakeman, the more likely you were to have one or more amputated. Smart brakemen when asked if they wanted to work XYZ train headed out would raise their hands with one or two fingers tucked down. (Ye gads, I read that in a comic more than 40 years ago.)
Absolutely fascinating. I didn't catch half the lingo either, but I've always loved how certain professions have their own dialects.
Great story! I hope we hear more from Spuds in the future.
I miss crummies. Damned EOT units got no soul to 'em.
This was a great story. I’ve been a rail fan since childhood and read so many railroad stories in books and magazines that I new exactly what Button was talking about.
You always bring such terrific detail to your stories and it makes them interesting and delightful to enjoy!
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I saw the very end of the caboose era and I miss them. EOTs , for all their functionality, just aren’t as nice as seeing the lights of a crummy on the end of a long freight train.
Definitely her not so cutie mark,but as a transit worker, it's true.
Blood, or thousands of volts, or sometimes a big burnt spot. Rules are writ, and on the paper back of a thousand incident reports and newspaper accounts.
I assume that first “hoof” is supposed to be “mouth” or “muzzle”?
Quite a fun read, though like Spuds all that lingo went over my head. Had to keep that vocab list handy!
"long enough to learn everything I thought I needed enough to know."
"long enough to learn everything I thought I needed to know."?
"and a lighting—a telegraph operator"
"and a lightning—a telegraph operator"?
"Buttons yawned and covered her hoof with a belated hoof"
"Buttons yawned and covered her mouth with a belated hoof"?
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It’s a proper medical repair
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I know, right? Sadly, lots of rookies have to learn the lessons for themselves rather than trust somepony who’s been there and done that.
He really could—he really should, although perhaps that’s unfair to the other ponies who work in other industries.
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And some of the slang from those days still holds on, like pinning on a car.
Obviously, for non-industrial railroads, it became apparent reasonably quickly that being able to interchange the cars (and therefore wanting a standard wheel gauge and coupler) was a good thing. The current design is based on the Janney coupler, first patented in 1873. They’re commonly called ‘knuckle couplers.’
I think that there may still be some industrial railroads using link and pin for specialty operations, although I’m not entirely sure of that.
Some quick wikipediaing showed me a picture of a knuckle coupler which had a provision for a link to be attached, if you were coupling older equipment which hadn’t been converted yet.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Early_Janney-type_AAR_coupler.JPG
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Thank you!
Sometimes it’s best to learn that type of thing from immersion, I think. And yeah, it is interesting how professions have their own dialects and lingo, probably more than you’d think. Sometimes it’s just little stuff and other times it’s all sorts of terminology.
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Hopefully we will, there’s lots of working mares and stallions out there who have stories to tell, and he’s always got ears to listen.
I know, right?
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I don’t have the full vocab, unfortunately, although I’ve picked up a thing or two in my years.
When I was a kid, we had a shortline that ran practically in our backyard, and I’ve been interested in trains since then, and you can never go wrong with a good railroad story.
Thank you!
I think I only saw a couple cabooses ‘live’ in my lifetime. Pretty sure they were Chessie cabooses—the local shortline didn’t come along until 1986, and we lived in that house starting in 1982, and I think that those lines were ex-C&O . . . I’d have to look up the history, TBH. Probably originally Pere Marquette tracks, if I had to guess.
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One of the risks of the trade, even now.
Yeah, and even now those rules are still being writ, unfortunately. Switching’s a dangerous enough job even if you don’t take shortcuts.
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Yes . . . correction made, thank you!
He needs to spend more time with railroaders, then he’ll learn it all.
I’ll be honest, I had to keep the list handy, too. I knew some of the slang, but certainly not all of it.
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corrections made, thank you!
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...and then he moved to Innocence to avoid copyright infringement and everything went to Tartarus.
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"or worse run through a switch so the yard goat had to pin on again"
.. and that works if it's an actual goat or not.
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in 2005 there was ONE railroad left in the US that used link and pins, and it was an industrial line for a brickworks. It ran from their clay pit to the factory. I forget where exactly, but Trains Magazine did an article on them. I would imagine they have shut down since, but I'm not sure
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Can confirm. Between me (the astrophysicist), my sister (the neuroscientist), and my two brothers (computer geeks), my dad likes to joke that he's not qualified to sit at his own dinner table. And he has a degree in aerospace, i.e., he is literally a rocket scientist. At least he makes a good audience for practicing science communication.
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Just looking at the story description and whatnot, I’m thinking of the Adult Conspiracy from the Xanth novels . . .
Also not entirely sure it’s okay to link that, due to rating. . .
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It does!
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Huh, that’s interesting. I would have actually expected more, TBH, although I guess there aren’t all that many small industrial railroads any more (I presume most of them use off-the-shelf tech, since that’d be cheaper than having your own equipment).
I don’t remember coming across that article, but then that was sixteen years ago . . . if my back issues were in order, I could probably find it easily enough, but they aren’t.
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We also have a rather diverse collection of knowledge in my family, although also enough common ground that things can mostly be explained without getting too much in the vernacular/trade language. Although I will admit, my brother (who is also a rocket scientist/aerodynamic engineer) does stuff I don’t fully understand. He’s good at it, though.
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IIRC, it was in the issue with the article about 844 titled "Never Retired". either that or the issue with the railroads of Route 66
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Didn’t find the article, but did find it on the web: Palmetto Brick. Some quick googling suggests that the rail operations are shut down, but that’s not for sure.
Here’s a vid of operations from 2008:
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yup, that's it!
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I have no idea what that is, but if it's not okay to think it, it's probably that.
For years I had that story listed at T. I only recently changed it to M after realizing no sane person would consider it T and the ratings are mostly for sane people. I guess I never considered a sane person might try to read my most disturbing stories, at least if they expected to stay that way.
Aw, that was lovely! Really like Buttons.
Now I'm wondering if everything that relies on electricity in Equestria has some pegasus-sounding name ;)
Anyway. Took me long enough to get around to read this, but you always manage to pull me into the story after a few paragraphs.
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The basic gist is the ‘adult conspiracy’ is sexual stuff which non-adults don’t know but learn when they become adults. In Xanth (IIRC) because it’s a magical, punny ‘verse, children can’t see/hear anything involved in it. I think seeing something they shouldn’t just was sorta blurred out in their vision, although it’s been a long time since I’ve read any of those stories so I don’t remember for sure.
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It honestly would make sense if it did, wouldn’t it?
Stay tuned, I’ve got another story with trains in the near-future.
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Ah, I see. That actually describes another story I have posted here that is currently on hiatus, but I don't think it has the Sex tag.
You should write something where somepony thinks they're meeting a trans pony but they're actually meeting a trains pony and madcap hijinx occur.
...or vice versa. I suppose asking somepony about whether or not they have a tunnel might seem rude.
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something something "Transpotting"
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I never really thought of trying to make that work in nudist Ponyland.
Hmm, I already did Rainbow Dash is a train, but I could do another with Trains Trixie. Starlight’s got her kites, why can’t Trixie have trains?
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¿Who knew that a metallic object with a mass of 10s of tons, capable of carrying thousands of tons might cause injury if it hits somepony? Trains can be very dangerous:
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Obviously that's how they keep their rating.
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That is how Equestria works. As soon as there's a content rating of Everyone, Clean, G, or whatever equivalent, attached to the story/artwork/show, anything exceeding that rating ... just doesn't exist.
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I personally don't see it that way, in part because I don't think that's as interesting from a storytelling perspective.
But . . . going down that road where everything that the ponies see as taboo is just automatically censored by Equestrian magic, that could lead to some interesting speculation on what they consider taboo and what they don't.