Steel doesn’t worry about a colt’s well-being. Railroad cars don’t have much concern for the bodies of ponies. But, despite the dangers, I wanted to be a railway pony. I wanted to be like Highball.
I was still a young colt when I took my first steps into the world of steam engines and railroading. I was meant to sing the song of steel, the chorus of the railways. Despite the challenges, discomfort, and dangers, I wanted to be a railway pony. I wanted a fine steam engine like #3803. I wanted to be like Highball.
What I got? Well now, there's a story worth telling...
I have always thought that if there was ever a stallion and a steam engine that were made for one another, then it was old Highball and his longtime partner, #3803.
They were made of the same stuff, and any railwaypony that laid eyes across the engineer as he tended to his locomotive would soon come to see it. Of all the railway ponies who sang the song of steel, he was the one I most admired. He was the one I wanted to be like.
I wanted to be like Highball.
In my youth, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would cost to do so.
“Ain’t it somethin’?” Grease Pit, master mechanic of the roundhouse, would say. Nodding in the direction of the older stallion, he’d wipe the oil from his hooves and ask me again, “Ain’t it somethin’, the way that he takes care o’ that engine—the way he’s able to sling his trains up and down the Old Main? Ain’t it somethin’, colt?”
“Yes sir,” I’d answer as I looked up from whatever I’d been occupied with. “Yes sir, it’s something to see alright.”
I was only a wiper in the roundhouse, but I’d always known that I was going to be an engineer. I’d known that long before I’d hired out on the Baltimare & Ohayo Railroad. I’d known that for a great long while. “Yes sir,” I’d say again, my mark burning bright. I could see that “something” that Highball had in him, that thing that made him a true railwaypony.
I could be that, too.
I could be like Highball.
I loved working in the roundhouse. I never tired of cantering onto Sutler Street and catching a glimpse of the roundhouse. On winter days, tall columns of steam rose from the smokejacks, bathing it in wisps of white. In the earliest part of the day, when the moisture of that dying winter hung in the air, I could stand between a couple of engines awaiting an assignment and listen to them breathe.
Yes sir, I said breathe.
That’s what makes a steam engine different from any other thing ponies build, and don’t let anypony ever tell you different. A steam engine is the closest ponies have come to making life itself. Each one feeds, breathes, feels, reacts. Each has its own personality. I would stand there on foggy, hazy mornings in the roundhouse, listening as the compressors came on. The beasts rumbled softly, a long, slow whuffff that filled the air around them. Each one sighed in their slumber, seeming more like behemoths of legend than constructs of steel. They breathed their smoke and steam, and there was a special magic in it.
Highball knew that.
Highball was a gentlestallion engineer of the old style. He was the best engineer on the Canterlot Division. Heh, he was probably the best on the Baltimare & Ohayo. His on-time, demerit, and safety cards were as clear as a virgin’s conscience, and his steady hooves had guided the division’s best trains up and down the Old Main longer than I had been alive.
He wore a necktie and a vest, adding a bit of style to the typical engineer’s garb. His beard was full and tidy. His grey eyes were keen and sharp behind the tiny glasses he wore, and they rested gently on his muzzle in their wire frames. He kept his mane pulled back, lest it get caught and tangled in some mechanization of the trains. That was never a good thing. I adopted the practice myself after checking in one day to find that one of my fellow wipers had learned that lesson the hard way.
Cleaning up blood was part of my job description, but I didn’t dwell on it. Railroading was always a dangerous job. Steel can only be made so safe. Highball knew that, and as a result he respected his engines.
He had been dancing the decks of engine cabs for decades, and each time he’d been assigned a new engine he’d made it his partner, not just his tool.
“He always takes it hard,” an engineer named Crosshead once told me. “He never likes to be assigned a new engine. Sometimes he even cries; it’s almost as though he never realizes he’s getting a better one!”
Now, keep in mind that this was back in the days when an engineer was assigned an engine… and an engine assigned an engineer. The two were inseparable until the company said that they were to be broken up. The engine could be replaced, or the engineer retired…
...or both could go to glory together in a wreck. Either way, they were partners for life.
I’ll say it again: I always thought that if there ever were a stallion and a steam engine that were made for each other, then it was old Highball and his longtime partner, Ten-Wheeler #3803.
Technically speaking, she was a TW3a class 4-6-0. That’s four guide wheels up front under the smokebox, six drivers, and no wheels under the firebox or cab, for you folks who may not be adept at the technical side of railroading. Her drivers were taller than a stallion, and her lines said “fast” and “strong” in every way that mattered.
Number 3803 was one of twenty-five such engines ordered from Equestrian Locomotive Works just shy of twelve years before I had hired on with the railroad, all numbered from 3800 to 3824.
A hostler at the engine works ran #3800 over a derail protector. He managed to flip it off the damn tracks and the engine slid down an embankment. The hostler was fired, of course, and that engine’s boiler still sits down in the river to this day.
Early in its career, #3801 came into Saddleburg on its run down from Baltimare on the Old Main. One of the overly decorated “Toy-class” engines had just grabbed its train to take it up the awful stretch of track to Canterlot. At that moment #3801’s boiler exploded due to low water. It turns out that the unicorn who set the spells on the water level gauge had cast them wrong. I was in school at the time, and I remember hearing the explosion.
The entire engine crew was killed.
Number 3802 was eaten by enchanted parasprites.
It seemed that the entire class of engine was about to be deemed “hoodoo”, or cursed, by the whole railroad, but then came #3803—then came her master, partner, and friend, Highball.
Together they held court over the Old Main, and they were a wonder to behold. If ever a machine and a stallion had been meant to be together, then Celestia herself couldn’t have done a better job matching them up. The engine complemented his style. They were no-nonsense but not cold, firm but fair, intuitive and predictable at the same time.
He called her “she”, never “it,” and out of deference for him, we all did the same.
“Morning,” Highball would say with a small nod, smiling as he ventured into the roundhouse to collect her for a run. “Are you the wiper who has been taking care of her?”
I wasn’t always assigned to wipe #3803, but when I had, I made every excuse to stay as near the engine as I could until he arrived. “Yes sir,” I’d say. “I did the glass and all the brightwork, shook down the fire, and helped Bullpen set up a new one.”
“Very well,” he’d say. “Thank you, colt. You did fine. Mighty fine.”
Bullpen was the hostler, the stallion in charge of moving engines in and out of the roundhouse. His job was to have ponies line up the turntable and take the locomotive out to where the switching crew and their little engine had made up a train. An engineer didn’t ever need to see the inside of the roundhouse stalls if he didn’t want to, but Bullpen always wore a smile when Highball came around.
“She sounds good,” Highball would say, his ears twitching as he focused on the sounds the engine was making. Bullpen would smile at me, and then we’d stand there grinning like great vast morons as the stallion worked his way up and down the locomotive. Highball wasn’t above getting his hooves dirty, even if his vest always seemed to stay clean of oil and soot. He’d look each moving part over, and then look them over again. The quiet stallion would add oil to the lubricators that still dripped with the oil that I had already added, just to be sure.
Watching Highball look #3803 over was like watching a stallion waking his mare from their bed. He used all of his senses. He seemed to be able to smell if some part was too hot. He knew all of her moods, and could hear even the tiniest complaint deep inside her workings.
“Is she good to go, Highball?” Bullpen would ask.
A small smile would find its way across the older stallion’s face. He’d nod to us as the ancient timber of the roundhouse looked on in approval. “It seems so. I should say that all is in order,” he’d say. Highball would nod to us once more, and then the gentle old stallion would lift himself into the cab.
I would watch with envy as a firestallion would join him. If they were worth their saltlicks, the firestallion would already have the fire high by the time Highball was done with his rounds. If not, the engineer would sit in his timeworn seat, wiping his handkerchief up and down the instruments. He would check the gauges and his bright brass watch over and over, silently letting the firestallion know that a lady was waiting.
When all was good and proper, Highball would set the reverser and open 3803’s throttle. At his touch, the good lady would come awake. He never set sand in the roundhouse–a professional courtesy–and he never needed to. Number 3803 came to life like a mare slipping gracefully down a stairwell at a formal reception.
Any decent firestallion would already be setting the injectors, serving the engine some sips of cold water to prepare her for her groom. These were the days before feedwater heaters, and a firestallion had to be careful. More than one of them saw me gazing up to them with daggers in my eyes as they made the engine “cough.”
Oh, how I envied them! I could feel little waves of jealousy ripple along my coat whenever I watched them take as fine an engine as #3803 out onto the turntable. My ears went back, angered that they got to head out on the mainline while my days centered around oily rags. Every one of 3803’s perfect lines would be highlighted in the sun as it turned on the table, her brass gauges and levers, the “bright work” of an engine as we called it, caught the light. Her faultless boiler jacket shone in the pink-orange light of the morning sun. I almost whinnied like a wild horse every time I stood there watching with a subtle wrath as some other colt got to head out to the yard or station to pick up a train.
My eyes were always on Highball. The second he sank into that right-hoof seat, he was at home. No stallion and no engine were ever more meant for each other, and as they steamed out of the circular confines of the roundhouse, the locomotive’s wheels didn’t even slip a fraction of an inch. So attuned was he to her moods that only a light touch of his hooves was needed to bring out her best behavior, power, strength, and speed.
Some day, I would say to myself, watching her tender disappear through the narrow gap of sunlight in the roundhouse walls, I will be the firestallion on an engine like that, and then an engineer. I was made for it, just like Highball.
The last cloud of steam and smoke would disappear across the stalls and bays of the roundhouse. “Number 457 just came in and needs to have her fire cleaned out,” Bullpen would say, or something to that effect, calling me out of my waking dream.
“I’ll get right on it,” I’d say. Soon enough, I would be wiping down my next engine. Each one was a true and worthy machine, each with a unique personality, but there was only one #3803. There was only one Highball.
Every railwaypony is prescribed their own materials by the company they hire on with. The workers on the Baltimare & Ohayo were no different. On every rulebook, inspection torch, derail device, or switch lock sat some embossed, engraved, or painted notice that the item belonged to the company.
Be it the silverware in the dining cars or a simple pasted notice on a label beneath the desk of the company president herself, everything that the great long foreleg of the company embraced was marked as such. It could be an extravagant notice such as “This rule book is property of the Baltimare & Ohayo Railroad Company, Inc. and is hereby leased to the undersigned for the duration of their employ” down to a simple “B&O” stamped in the tin of a lantern hood.
Truth be told, the company can put their name on anything that they like, but each pony knew what was theirs, and they guarded it jealously. Oh, it was easy enough to see with the big things like engineers and their engines, and conductors and their crummies. But in all honesty, such avarice touched each of us. Every brakestallion had a lantern to call their very own, and it was not to be touched by any other. Every firestallion had a coal scoop that they favored, and they would not suffer others to lay their hooves on it.
Yessir, every firestallion had his own coal scoop. In time, even me.
I came to work at the roundhouse one late spring morning to find Grease Pit standing in front of my locker, growling at me like a housecat caught in a pickle barrel.
“I don’t ever want to see your name on the wiper board again, colt!” he barked.
“I-I’m sorry! W-what did I do?!” I answered as I backpedalled my hooves across the tiled floor of the locker room.
He stared at me for a second… and then let loose with a belly laugh that brought other colts and stallions trotting into the locker room to see what hubbub could be about. “Why, colt, what’ve you done? Why, you’ve been promoted, that’s what!” he said, his large stomach bouncing on his chuckles. “Head over to the crew caller’s desk and File Cabinet will get you started on the paperwork.”
I remember standing there gawking, my mouth hanging open like a damned fool as he laughed at his own joke.
“Well, colt, get a move on! You don’t wanna be late for your first day as a firestallion, do ya’?”
A firestallion… I was a crewpony serving on an engine.
I was getting that much closer to my dream.
I was that much closer to being like Highball.
Working in the roundhouse had been hard, dirty work. Being a firestallion was hard, dirty, dangerous, and exhausting.
File Cabinet said that I had enough seniority to bid on a brakepony job, but I turned that down lickety-split. Yeah, they got paid more, but they didn’t get to work the engines. They didn’t help bring the behemoths to life—to feed them and make them breathe and trot along.
Besides, their seniority lead to becoming a conductor one day, not an engineer.
So it was that I became a firestallion. My back has never forgiven me.
When I hired out, the automatic stoker was still something of a fantasy—as much a fairy-tale as the Mare in the Moon. No, we firestallions and our coal scoops were the only things that kept the fires fed—that made the steam to make the engines fly down the rails. There was honesty to the work, and I took to every engine that the callboard assigned me.
“You’ll get the hang of it sure enough, colt,” Crosshead said that first day as I climbed up into the cab of a little black yard switcher. “It’s easy to learn, but damn tough to master. We’ll see what you’ve got in you sure enough.”
During the next year, my scoop, my back, and the whole railroad between Saddleburg and Baltimare learned what I was made of, and I did too. It was hard work, and it took its toll on my body and my mind. There were days that I’d come home to simply sit and shake. My body protested the way I had to stand on my rear legs to shovel the coal. My face felt like it was becoming leather. The hot blast of air escaping the firebox hit me right across my cheeks every time I stepped on the pedal to open the big steel butterfly doors.
But what you’ve gotta understand is that it wasn’t just the fires that we had to keep our eyes on. The firestallions also had to pay attention to the water level, and we were the ones who’d get angry, disappointed stares from the engineer if the low-water chime started going off. We were the ones who would get the demerit if a train had to be stopped on the main for lack of water. That ran only second to the fear of the boiler exploding and sending the crew and locomotive off to the Happy Valley Railway.
Which, just in case you are unaware of railway terminology, is a euphemism for “being blown to bits or killed in any other various and sundry ways upon the railroad.”
Every engine was different, and each wanted its fires tended in a different way. Some were finicky, others ravenous. Some wouldn’t mind too much if the firepony let his fires get uneven… others would immediately begin to buck and snort. Type or class didn’t matter worth a damn either, with a few notable exceptions, as every engine had its own wants and needs.
I started off on the yard switcher, working along with Crosshead. Before too long, I was assigned to local freights, bobbling up and down the Old Main. The district I covered was between Saddleburg and Steeplechase. Other times, I’d be assigned to head south to Capital Transfer at the base of the mountain where Canterlot sat perched high overhead. We worked at all of the small shops and businesses, picking up and dropping off cars of goods, raw materials, and produce. The frequent starts and stops drove me mad, and each time we started again, I had to work frantically to rebuild my fire as the brakestallions swung their lanterns, telling the engineer to come forward, stop, or back up.
It was tiring work; it stole years out of me, and nearly cost me my life.
My engineer that day was Headlight. “Hey, colt,” he said while we pulled up to a water tank. “Fill her up to the top! I don’t wanna stop at Gallopton; I wanna head back to Saddleburg clear through, so fill her up to the top! To the top, colt!”
I mumbled a bit. As though I wouldn’t have filled it up anyway! But, tired as I was, I simply went through the motions. I climbed back over the coal load onto the tender, and as we slowly approached the water tower, I reached up for the chain that would lower the spigot and fill the tender with water.
I pulled at the chain drowsily… and everything went to the Well.
My legs were swept out from under me. Cold, stinging waters cascaded over me as I fell to the sunbaked steel of the tender. My jaw struck first, sending shocks of color through my vision and arcs of pain along my body. The water pouring across the tender washed me over the side, and I went falling to the cold stones of the ballast a good eight feet below.
When I woke up, three stallions were staring down at me. Headlight, the engineer, and Brains, the conductor, wrung their hats in their hooves and made sympathetic sounds. My friend, Fusee, a brakestallion, had my head in his lap. He patted my shoulder and told me to ‘Stay still. Just keep still.’
“W-what in the Well happened?” I asked, awash with confusion.
“You forgot to lift the hatch on the water compartment of the tender,” Brains said, brushing his hoof through his mane and sighing with relief as he saw me moving my legs. “It had nowhere to go, colt, and so over the side you went…”
That was how I got my first demerit. It boiled inside me as I lay on my bed at home taking a mandatory, and unpaid, three-day vacation. My head throbbed, and I moaned in pain, disappointment, and disgust at myself.
“Damnation,” I whispered. “To Tartarus with it all.”
I pictured myself going back to work in the yard, or even to the roundhouse. For a few fleeting moments, I even thought my career might be over. What was there for a colt like me to do with my life if there was no place on the railroad?
The fear was unfounded. It turns out that a single demerit still made me the cleanest of all the young firestallions on the Canterlot Division. So, I suppose, that was why they put me on the trains heading up to Canterlot itself.
Some reward it turned out to be…
I never did like the damn Toy-class engines.
Freights used the original mainline between Saddleburg and Ponyville, but only a few passenger trains stopped at Capital Transfer, the station at the base of the mountain. There, the passengers and freight could be put on an inclined railway up the mountain. The stretch of rail that climbed up the mountain was some of the worst railroading in Equestria, if not on all of Equus.
The line up the mountain was a provision in the Baltimare & Ohayo’s charter. They got to be the first to build a line from Baltimare, but they had to build a stretch up the mountain into the capital city itself, rather than just below.
The line and the engines that were assigned to it were miserable, and there ain’t no two ways about it. The line disappeared into countless tunnels, grasping and clawing for altitude on impossible grades and curves with radiuses that could only be called ridiculous.
The Toy Class engines weren’t any better. I swear that an executive or a politician had designed the damn things as no sensible designer would have approved of them. The rumor was that a politician had thought that the engines serving the capital should look the part and should not be “ugly,” and the railroad had bowed under pressure. The end result was a series of engine classes that were universally despised by railway ponies of all stripes.
What we got were a series of tiny engines, some with wheel arrangements as bizarre as 2-2-0 that seemed like they were designed to be the playthings of eight-year-old fillies rather than steam engines.
“Not what you’d thought when you signed your soul over to the Baltimare & Ohayo, eh colt?” Valve Gear, a rotund engineer, once told me as we flew from one choking, steam-and-smoke-filled tunnel to the next.
“No, sir, not at all,” I answered. I gasped for air as I swung another load of coal into the permanently opened firebox door. It was a waste of heat and coal–just one of the flaws of the class.
The white paint kept getting dirty, and the heat of the engine made it flake off the backhead every time they were repainted, leaving the cab looking like a snowstorm. It was impossible to see out the windows as they’d been made to look like hearts, of all things, and were centered over the back head. The drivers were huge, and they slipped on rails that had as little as a drop of dew on them. More than once, the damn things jumped off the rails because they were so light, leaving the crews staring off into the Well of Souls as the engine dangled precariously at the precipice of the mountainside.
I hated them, and I couldn’t tell if I had been assigned to work the mountain line as reward or punishment. But try as I might to hate the job itself… well, I couldn’t. I was made for railroading. At times, I could look back behind the Toy Class engines to see a string of passenger cars shining in the sun as we climbed the mountain, and I loved every moment of it.
But it was hard work. Damn hard. I worked the mountain all of that long winter. The cabs of the Toy Classes were all steam, snow, fire, and ice at once. Sleet and wind made it seem like a purgatory in that cab even as the passengers sang Hearth’s Warming songs and enjoyed fine teas, cocoas, desserts, and dinners on company china in the dining car that trailed behind.
But it seemed I was being watched all that time. Somepony had liked what he’d seen.
We came down the mountain one day in late winter. The brakes of the cars were protesting, and the damn Toy-class engine we had been assigned slid into the station at Saddleburg on its perpetually petulant drivers. No amount of sand could make those things behave; more than one engineer had taken lesser assignments rather than work the mountain.
Those who had survived that trial, though, had gone on to better things. One of them watched me as I worked the fire of the awful engine after we arrived at the station.
We uncoupled from our train, The Alydar, pulled forward, then backed through the switch at the end of the station track. This left the train for a far more worthy engine to come along and take it up the Old Main to Baltimare. Inside the firebox, the poorly designed slope kept knocking my fire down on top of itself, and I raced to level the flames once again. The firebox doors of the Toy-class engines were only just big enough to fit a coal scoop inside, another one of their faults, and a firestallion had to be careful about how he set the fire.
I could have just left it, as all that remained was to take the engine over to the roundhouse and leave it for the night. But, being the compulsive sort, I wasn’t going to get caught making black smoke. I guess that sort of thing–the way I tended to every engine I worked on, even those I was rather cross with–that finally made me catch his attention.
As I worked my scoop into the firebox, I heard the relief engine come up and glide into place. I barely heard the couplers come together. That was as clean a coupling as I’ve heard, I thought to myself. I doubt the passengers even knew it happened. It must be a fine engineer who can…
My eyes went a little wide. I listened a bit harder, and soon I recognized the sounds of #3803. She had her own voice—her own distinctive note to each chuff and whir. Even her compressor seemed to be more ladylike and austere than any other I’d heard. The whistle sounded out in a single short burst, telling all around her that the engine had come to a stop. I slowly lowered my scoop and turned around, stepping to the deck plates between the cab and the tender.
I looked up past the station platform to find Highball staring down to me from her cab. There was a smile across his face as 3803 sat steaming politely amid flakes of snow, waiting for the prescribed moment on the timetable when she would begin her race up the Old Main.
“Morning, colt,” he said with a nod. He wrapped his scarf around him, and as he spoke, his breath poured out over the station platform in a mist of vapor. “How was the trip down the mountain? Any faults with the train?”
“No sir, no faults with the train, and none with the engine… apart from those that it was designed with,” I said, doffing my striped cap in deference to the senior engineer on the division, my idol, and his fine engine. A cold wind whipped down the station platform, driving a chill through me. I placed my cap back over my wet mane, slick with sweat as it was.
Highball laughed back at me, a polite little laugh, and then nodded in agreement. The reputation of the Toy Class was universally acknowledged; Highball himself had served his time on the mountain grade.
“Well,” he said as he leaned out of the window and looked down the sweep of the passenger cars, “despite all of that, I saw you bring the train down nice and clean. You and the rest of the crew, that is. Nice white smoke all the while. Well done, colt. Well done.”
“Th-thank you,” I stammered, wiping the back of my hoof across my face. “I do what I can. They might not be much in the way of engines, but they do deserve the best I can give them.”
Highball stared at me for a second. He nodded once more, and I saw something go across his face—something that seemed almost grandfatherly in its approval of my statement. “That’s right, colt,” he answered knowingly, “that’s quite right.”
The conductor of The Alydar came forward to speak with Highball, trudging forward through the slushy snow of the station platform. I saw the bright, polished surfaces of their watches glinting in the late morning sun. I made myself busy in the cab of the engine as I listened to them speak. They went over the schedule together, and before too long, #3803’s cheerful whistle sounded out across the platforms of the station.
I stepped back to the deck plate of the cab, and as I watched, Highball cracked open 3803’s throttle and laid down just enough sand to help his engine out of the station. I swear to this day that he never used one grain more than was necessary.
Her drivers didn’t slip even a fraction of an inch, and exactly on the half-minute that the timetable directed, Highball had his train underway. I leaned out once again, looking at the grand spectacle of the train as it began to roll. A cloud of steam filled the station as the cylinders let the thick, heavy rolls of moisture escape across the platforms.
I gazed up just in time to see Highball looking back to me. The same grandfatherly expression still sat in his face. He had watched me looking at the scene in awe—had seen how my eyes looked over the departure with something resembling respect and joy.
He nodded to me again. I lifted my cap. As the train gained speed, the old engineer slipped back into his seat fully. Within moments, The Alydar was racing off into the distance.
A freight train came blasting down the main on the opposing track, covering the scene with grey smoke of its own. I chuckled to myself at the poor job the engine crew was doing. Not long later, I nearly jumped out of my coat when my engineer tapped me on the shoulders, knocking me out of my smirking superiority.
“Come along then, colt,” he said, motioning to the backhead of the Toy Class engine we were in charge of. “Let’s get this hog back to the roundhouse. Back to work… you ain’t Highball’s firestallion yet.”
One day, not long after I had watched Highball and his good lady take The Alydar off into the distance, I was making my way through the wet, slushy railyard.
This was always an iffy proposition at best; we were always taught to look up and down each track, keep our ears up and listening, and to never place our hooves on the rails as we made our way across. A tumble to the timber and steel would leave us in a world of hurt, and the wet snow of a late winter made things that much more dangerous.
But I was young and stupid—unlearned in the harsh ways of the railway ponies.
That is opposed to now, of course, when I’m old and stupid.
There was some matter on my mind that, at the time, must have seemed quite heavy, but which has passed away into insignificance with each growing year. It was most likely union work, rent, or some other damn thing.
I stepped through the yard with my coal scoop swaying from my mouth. The tang of metal and sweat sat deep in the steel and wood of the handle, and I picked my way through the web of steel, not much aware of anything else.
I’d just crossed behind a long string of boxcars and set out across the next set of tracks when the air was ripped out of my lungs. My senses came awake as my vision filled with rust and steel. White lettering sped past, flashing through my racing, panicked thoughts.
My coal scoop dropped from my mouth, clanging to the ballast.
I stood there, breathing heavily as the cut of three freight cars that had nearly dashed my brains across the yard rolled farther away and down the long classification track.
When I had entered the yard, some foolishness had been going through my head. I stared at the cut of cars as it slowly came to a stop in the distance. Instead of my foolishness, I had almost had three freight cars try to go through my head. The realization of how poorly that would have gone made me suddenly feel quite ill. In my carelessness, I hadn’t heard the switching engine “kicking cars” into the track—giving them a swift push and then just letting them roll away under their own volition—and simply assumed from the smoke that it was working far away.
Those freight cars… they had come as close to my face as a razor during a shave. The very thought of it made me nauseous. I wanted to be sick.
I picked up my coal scoop, and as my body shook, I hopped up into an empty boxcar. There, my eyes settled over flattened, empty shipping pallets marked with “Property of Mairsy Dotes, Inc.” Vast, uncontrollable shudders racked my body, and staring at the empty pallets, I realized how very close I had come to heading off to the Happy Valley Railroad.
I sat there for a good twenty minutes… then picked myself up and went back to the roundhouse, fully alert and watching the yard tracks with a newfound focus.
The railroad sings a song of steel, and we railway ponies can only keep the refrain. Some sing it better than others, and I’ve missed a few notes here and there, like I did there, alone, in the snowy yard.
Some sing it better than others, and Highball sang it very well, he and #3803.
But even he couldn’t sing it forever.
Further down the line from Capital Transfer is the nice little city of Ponyville. It is the actual terminal of the Canterlot Division, but I didn’t get down there too much. There was one day a year, though, when Ponyville vexed the whole railroad.
Every year, a festival called Winter Wrap-Up brought all of the ponies that lived there, past and present, back home to clear away the winter snow and ice and such. It was a bit baffling to those of us who didn’t make our homes there, but it was a fine earth pony tradition, so I didn’t say much about it.
Most railway ponies are earth ponies, you see. I’m not saying that there weren’t a few unicorns, or even a pegasus pony or two, but earth ponies held most positions. It’s just a natural extension of the earth magic of our race. What is steel but refined earth, after all?
It was the day of Winter Wrap-Up in Ponyville, and for a good solid week, the passenger trains had been full of ponies heading home for the holiday. To the railroad, that was a blessing and a curse, as we found our callboard absent of many Ponyvillians.
“Seems like we forgot to plan for it again this year,” I heard File Cabinet say. He rustled through the papers on his desk, searching to see if there was some name he’d forgotten. “How do we forget to plan for it every year?”
“Well, we’d better get on it fast,” I heard Grease Pit answer. “You’ve already stolen away all of my older wipers to become firestallions and brakeponies for the day. Celestia willing they all come back in one piece.”
I placed my few small things in my locker and then slowly trotted forward into the office, wondering all the while what fate would bring me that day.
“Well, you best find me a senior firestallion right quick,” Bullpen said, trotting in from the roundhouse in a cloud of cinders and streaked with oil. “Number 3803 is all steamed up, and The Affirmed will be arriving in half an hour. Highball will be needing a senior firestallion.”
My head dropped low. I had only been with the railroad for three years, and despite only having a few demerits, I still didn’t have much seniority over many of the other firestallions. I sighed and leaned against the rack that held all of the union paperwork and safety pamphlets. My eyes went back and forth across all of the titles. Asking for Time Off: A Survival Guide, Switch Stands: Knowing Your Enemy, and So You’ve Been Dismembered… all of the titles just sat there, sitting in my perceptions as I waited my turn for the stallions to notice me.
In a mere moment, everything changed.
A hoof lay across my shoulder, and I felt somepony patting me on the back. I jumped a little; as I looked up, I half expected to see Fusee or one of my other friends, associates, or co-conspirators looking back to me.
“How about this colt here, File? I’m sure that he’s equal to the task. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t have him as my firestallion today?”
I stood there, my jaw open, as Highball brought his hoof from my shoulders to his vest pocket. The quiet stallion took a few steps forward, his hooves sounding out against the tiles, and repeated his question.
“Well, gentlestallions, is there any reason why he shouldn’t be?”
“No, I suppose not,” File Cabinet said. He looked at me over the top of his glasses, leaned back, and moved my name on the callboard, marking me as being assigned Train #22, The Affirmed.
At some point, I remembered to breathe again.
“Well, colt,” Grease Pit said with a smile. “Hop to it! You know to get the fire…”
I heard the three stallions laughing as I sped out of the office and into the roundhouse. I’m certain that my hooves never once touched the concrete. I did a fine impression of a pegasus as I flew to where I could hear #3803 simmering away.
I don’t even remember how my coal scoop got in my hooves. All that I knew was that I suddenly found myself staring up into her cab, the bright work shining in the reflection of the small fire that the hostlers had kept in her firebox.
I lifted myself up, making the grand entrance that I had envied time and time again. Her cab was remarkable. It was immaculate, clear of debris and grime. As I looked at it, all that I could do was imagine myself entering a mare’s boudoir, awaiting her presence.
My striped cap came off my head in respect. I wiped back my mane, making myself presentable, and held my cap to my chest.
“Ma’am,” I said, reintroducing myself, then I set to work.
I remembered every mistake that I’d ever seen other firestallions make, and I banished each one from my performance. Her fire was up and ready, resting easily and burning contently by the time I heard Bullpen and Highball approach. I wiped off anything that my hooves had touched, making sure that nothing was out of place, and then I took my prescribed place in the left-hoof seat.
Highball lifted himself into the cab. His grey eyes slid across the backhead of the engine, taking every detail of his lady. His gaze settled across the fire and the water levels. He smiled a little as he heard her injectors open up, feeding the water slowly as I had designed.
“Have you fired a TW3a before, colt?” he asked, settling into his seat. The engineer turned around so that he faced backwards to look out the slowly opening roundhouse bay doors.
“N-no sir, I can’t say that I have,” I stammered.
“Well, don’t worry about that too much,” he said, resting his hoof on the throttle. “Just treat her like a mare, and she’ll be a lady about it.”
“Yes sir,” I said. Bullpen waved us on, and steam filled 3803’s cylinders. With that, my first trip up the Old Main with Highball began.
You’d think that I’d recall more of it.
At one point we came out of the “haunted” tunnel at Moonville, a place that would figure prominently later in my career. I remember the great wash of light that filled the cab, making her brass fittings shimmer and shine.
I remember him testing me at one point. We were pulling fine and proper, the engine singing her song in staccato notes, when suddenly everything seemed to go to the Well. I found myself shoveling at a rate that didn’t seem, well… very ladylike for 3803. I checked the water levels and the fire over twice, and it didn’t seem as though I had done anything wrong. A glance out the window told that there was no grade of any note.
All sorts of possibilities raced through my mind as I fought to keep up with her demand for more fuel, my back aching as sweat began to pour down my face in new abundance, catching in tangles of my mane that had come loose.
I risked a brief look to Highball to see him eyeing me over the top of his glasses. I blanched for a second and went running around screaming in my own mind as my idol watched me huff and puff. Just then, a realization went through my head. My eyes levelled across the reverser; I noticed that it was sitting just a few notches forward of where it had been the whole trip.
That’s important, you see, as it meant that more steam was going through the cylinders than needed to, and I was shoveling faster than I should have. Bewilderment settled across me. Why was he making extra steam? My gaze returned to Highball, and saw him smiling at me. I nodded, acknowledging what he had done.
He had tested me–had wanted to see what I would do under the pressure.
“Always stoke smarter, not harder,” he said. It was the only thing I can remember him saying the whole trip. It was a lesson I kept with me throughout my career.
You’d think I’d remember more from that trip. I do recall seeing the ocean from a distance as we came out around a sweeping curve, #3803 staying true as the spires and rooftops of Baltimare spread out before us. I remember the muffled sounds inside Baltimare’s ancient, covered roundhouse. Number 3803 looked positively regal, slowly spinning on the decked turntable and awash in steam as they serviced her for our return trip.
I remember Highball taking me across the street to a bar, of all places. We sat off to one side and had beans and hashed browns at an old, time-worn table, one I suspect he had eaten at for years. I recall him telling me that it was time to couple to the southbound Alydar.
I remember thinking about how the uphill climb all the way back to Saddleburg would be hard work, and that 3803 would finally show me her rough, unhappy side. I was dead wrong. The engine purred and sang her song as her groom sat in his chair, the cold spring air flying through his beard and greying mane.
I should remember more. I should have so many crisp, clear memories of that day, but I don’t. Nope, they’ve all dimmed with time, I suppose.
One stands out, though. One memory remains as clear as the moment it happened.
We returned to the roundhouse, and as Bullpen gathered 3803 back into the bay, we stepped down and headed for the office. File Cabinet nodded to Highball as he turned in his report. “How did the colt do?” File asked, nodding in my direction.
“He did quite well,” Highball answered. “I should like to have him as my firestallion during any of my runs, if he’s available.”
They both waited for a moment as I gathered up my coal scoop. I don’t think that I even recalled dropping it, but the moment it clattered to the floor, I knew this was no dream.
So I became Highball’s firestallion, and bucking the seniority of the roundhouse only cost me an extra tray of my mother’s brownies at the next union meeting.
I had finally come to a place where I could study under a master… where I could become a railway pony of the first order. I could be an engineer.
Like Highball.
If I had known at that moment what the cost would be, I would have quit on the spot and gone off to college like my mother always wanted.
There were three things that made Highball the engineer he was.
The first was #3803, of course, as the two were a single being. The second was his long decades of skill and practice. He had hired out as a colt, just like me, but his past was a bit murky. Truth be told, he had started out when he was hardly higher than a stallion’s withers, not much past the age most fillies and colts would still be in school. Those were different days though, and he was made of firmer stuff, like most older generations always seem to be. His schoolyard had been the railway yards, the tangle of steel where little black switching engines had kicked cars around. His schoolhouse had been the roundhouse in Baltimare.
The third part of the trifecta was older than Highball or #3803 and filled with many more legends than just this one stallion and his steamer alone.
The Old Main was the first section of the Baltimare & Ohayo railroad ever laid. That, by the space of a few months, made it the oldest stretch of railroad in Equestria, and perhaps all of Equus. It had been hewn from rock with muscle and magic. It had been laid across woodlands and swamps by the heaving strength of stallions and the guile of all three races. It had tunnels deep and dark, and bridges high and lofty. The division had sharp curves and long stretches of sweeping tracks whose miles had been paid for in ponies' lives.
The technology had been new. The techniques had been new, and there had been a price. Invocations were still said in roundhouses, interlocking towers, and section houses all along the Baltimare & Ohayo for those who made it possible.
Then, a decade later, some pony in management realized that the real money was in Manehattan, not Baltimare, so the New Main was built connecting Saddleburg and that glittering metropolis. The difference between the two divisions was night-and-day. Technology made the new line a much easier bit of railroad to handle.
It took a special kind of engineer to move what traffic went up and down the Old Main over it at a steady, safe clip. It took a special kind of engine, too. Put all three of them together—Highball, 3803, and the Old Main—and I had a perfect school for growing into my mark.
I recall that year fondly. I remember the spring breaking cold and wet, but turning warm… and wet. One day we came out of the cuts above Moonville to find the valley awash in fog, obscuring the rails completely and leaving the signal targets looking like the forlorn lights of ships on a forgotten ocean.
Highball settled deeper into his seat, drew his hoof through his beard, and gave a contemplative hum. His practiced hoof guided his engine through that fog with a casual ease.
I swear he could sense the rails beneath him, and that he could feel the way that they were flexing beneath 3803’s drivers. He was built for this stretch of track. He anticipated every unseen curve, and I watched my water and kept my fire hot as we flitted across the landscape like ghosts floating through a memory.
Later that spring, we were proceeding up the hill to Saddleburg with a special mail express when Highball suddenly dumped the air brake.
I had been in the middle of throwing a scoop of coal into the firebox. When the train went into its emergency stop it dashed me against the back head and firebox door. I went sprawling to the deck of the cab as Highball guided 3803 through the worst of it, doing his best not to send the engine off the tracks and the express cars flying across the farm fields that lined the grade.
When I was able to pull myself off the floor, I looked out the window and down the length of 3803’s boiler. My face went white as I saw what Highball had somehow sensed. There, just on the inside of the curve, was a section crew moaning beneath their toppled speeder. Behind them, their cart lay upside down, their tools scattered across the mainline.
As the conductor came trotting forward, Highball and I leapt out of the cab and to the aid of the six stallions that lay sprawled across the track. They had taken the curve too fast and flipped their speeder, pinning two beneath it and sending the rest tumbling across the ballast, rails, and ties.
There was no way he could have seen them, not on that curve. Somehow, he had just known, sang the refrain in my head. Somehow, Highball just knew… could sense that something was wrong.
That was how it was with Highball, #3803, and the Old Main. It was something to see, that I can tell you. That spring was the happiest of my career to that point, and the images that have sat behind my eyes all of these years remind me that it was one of the best of my life.
I remember looking up one evening to see Highball sitting in his chair with his left hindhoof resting on the back head. He was leaning deep into the cushions, looking as content as a cat in the jaybird seat. The wind was whistling past us as we flew up the Old Main, and his beard bounced on the winds. The clear grey of his eyes settled across the rails in front of him, and the first stars appeared over the tracks.
His hoof went from resting on the throttle to lovingly stroking it. The spring winds, complete with their chill, buffeted his mane and beard as he leaned out the window or stared ahead down the length of the boiler jacket. The headlight found the rails, showed him every approaching milepost as the telegraph poles flew by like fenceposts, and sparks flew overhead in the form of dying embers. The starlight caught Highball in his repose, and when I opened the firebox doors, the soft oranges flickered in the reflections that fell off his glasses and the chain of his pocket watch.
Here was a railway pony of the first order. Here was a true railroader, a wabash artist… a stallion who knew his mark well and who had the right tools and talent to fill it.
I have always thought that if there was ever a stallion and a steam engine that were made for each other, then it was old Highball and his longtime partner, Ten-Wheeler #3803. Together they sat as royalty over the division, and they simply were a sight to see.
It only made sense that disaster would come when the trinity was broken, when he and his engine left the Old Main.
It was strawberries, of all things, that did it.
The area west of Ponyville was good agricultural land. It was famed for its apple orchards, carrot farms, and flower nurseries. Another crop that was highly seasonable, and highly profitable, was strawberries.
Every year, just after the summer solstice, the berry crop would start rolling in. Whole yards full of white reefer cars that had slept for the last five months would suddenly come to life. Ice that had been harvested from frozen ponds in the winter was ground up and spread across green baskets of the plump berries. The railroad’s job was to race those trains north to Baltimare and Manehattan, or west to Los Pegasus and Vanhoover.
Highball had been quieter than usual, and our last few runs had passed in only the barest conversation.
“Oh, just feeling the tiredness in my bones, colt,” he had said as we arrived in Saddleburg with an express passenger train. “I could stand to mark off for day or two, I think.”
Bullpen came trotting up to us as I tried to wrap my mind around what I had just heard. Highball wanting to mark off was… well, he never wanted to mark off.
“Hello there, Highball! Do you still have time on your card? You haven’t outlawed yet, have you?” he asked, wondering how much time Highball and I had before we reached our legally mandated time off.
“Yes,” he said, a certain tiredness hanging in his voice, “I do have about four hours left, but I was hoping to go back to the boarding house and rest a little, though…”
I stood there, aghast. I’d never heard him actually state that he wanted to be away from the railroad. Bullpen noticed it too, and he stammered his request in surprise at the older stallion’s words.
“W-well, I s-suppose that’s your right, but with the berry rush on, we’re a bit short-hooved, you see?” He lifted his hoof, motioning towards the yard where another passenger engine, a TW2c, sat forlornly. Mechanics moved around the front of the locomotive and cursed under their breaths.
“That engine just shore a cylinder head,” he said, wiping his hoof across his forehead. “You can mark off, but #3803 here is the only engine available. W-we’ll have to have another crew take her and–”
“I’ll take the train,” Highball said, and before Bullpen had even stepped away he was back in his seat. He was indignant, of course. They may as well have attempted to sell a stallion’s daughter as let any other engineer touch 3803.
I worked the fire back up, and my friend Fusee, the brakepony, joined me as we backed down to the empty refrigerated cars. Fusee waved his lantern, guiding us closer as we coupled to the train.
I noticed that the coupling, though not bad, was harder than I had come to expect from Highball. I marked it off to him being upset. Though I had placed him on a pedestal, I knew he wasn’t above having moods. I simply went back to shoveling… though I couldn’t help but notice that Highball was a bit off.
In truth, I have to admit that it was more than a bit, now that I’ve had these years to think on it.
Fusee took up a position as a head-end brakeman, sitting atop the coal pile, watching me stoke the fire and watch the water levels. He made small jokes all the while, but the persistent feeling of unease that hung around #3803’s cab soon silenced him.
“Highball,” I asked. “Are you alright?”
“Why, I suppose I’m just a little tired, colt. That’s all,” he answered, forcing a smile. I tried to smile back at him, but the ashen look across his face stole something out of me.
He’s just tired, is all, I told myself. I looked up to Fusee. He didn’t believe it either.
We arrived in the yard outside Ponyville. Our run down the Ponyville Subdivision had been on time, but I knew that Highball had made the run with nearly twenty minutes to spare with heavier trains before. Fusee uncoupled us from the empties, and as we slowly turned on the Ponyville turntable, I watched the summer sun sitting across Highball’s features.
The color was washing out of him. Something was wrong.
“Highball…”
“I’m fine, dammit!”
It was the first time he’d ever snapped at me.
We backed down into the yard, and there we coupled onto a string of stark-white reefers. It was one of the half-dozen trains awaiting engines in the yard next to the icehouse and icing platforms. The strawberry rush was on, and there was already water trickling from their sills. The ice inside would only keep the berries market-fresh for a day, so we had to hustle them back to Saddleburg where they would be taken to Manehattan or Baltimare.
Fusee waited until he saw the rear end brakepony and the conductor wave from the caboose before giving Highball… well, the highball, the signal to make speed. Fusee leapt up onto the engine as we began to make our way through the yard tracks and out to the mainline.
I nearly jumped out of my denim jacket when I heard #3803’s drive wheels slip. I had thought that it was impossible. I had never thought that he would… that Highball could ever…
We hit green signals all the way, but as stations began to pass less frequently, I had another horrible realization. We were losing time. Highball was losing time…
“We’re… w-we’re going to have to ssstop for water at Capital Transssfer,” he said, slurring his words and scaring me half to death. Usually a light express train could fly all the way between Ponyville and Saddleburg without stopping for water. Only poor handling and using too much steam would account for such a thing.
“Yes sir,” I said, heading into the tender.
Fusee looked at me as I approached, and I knew that he could see that something was horribly wrong, too.
“When we pull in for water at Capital Transfer, I’m going to need you to head into the cab,” I said, whispering into Fusee’s ear. “He’ll fight us, but we’re going to need to get him out of that seat. Something’s wrong. Something is very wrong… He looks like he’s dying.”
Fusee nodded, and I went back to stoking my fire. The life seemed to drip out of my idol as he sat hunched over, the color fading from his face.
We approached the final curve before Capital Transfer, and as the train began to slow, I placed my coal scoop on the deck and headed back over the tender to the water hatch.
I nodded to Fusee as I did. All sorts of worry and concern were painted across his face, and with a nod, he made his way into the cab. I felt like the steam of ten thousand engines was crammed inside my head. As I watched him go, I pondered what I should do next. I climbed onto the hot, steel deck of the tender. No matter what, this would change everything.
I only wish I had known how much.
I stood upright, expecting to feel the train slowing further as we approached the water tank. But instead, as we raced through the runaround tracks at Capital Transfer, I looked up to see the station agent standing at the platform with a hoop of orders…
… orders that were still in the hoop.
Highball hadn’t grabbed the orders. The look on the face of the station agent spoke volumes. He looked like he’s seen all of the horrors that lurked inside Moonville Tunnel. I watched as he sank to his hind legs, and I knew that something was wrong.
The train wasn’t slowing for the water tower. In fact, it was going faster. The speed picked up as we rounded the curve outside the station. A red target signal raced past me. The vacuum tore my hat from my head, and I dove for the deck of the tender.
I opened my eyes to see a sight that will stay with me forever.
In the cab, Highball sat limp across the throttle, the bar pushed far forward under his weight. He wasn’t moving, and Fusee was struggling heroically to lift the old stallion out of the seat.
It looked like a filly lifting her ragdoll. All of the life had left the stallion, and he sprawled across the deck, his legs unmoving, his eyes open, his jaw moving up and down.
“The throttle!” I shouted over the winds. “Fusee, the throttle!” I called to him again and again, braying the words into the air, fighting to lift them over the roar of the train. It was useless… utterly useless. We lurched through the final curve before the water tower, and there I saw something that froze my blood.
A brakepony stood by the trackside, waving his lantern furiously. He flashed through my vision in an instant, but it seemed like an eternity. The red signal… there was a train ahead of us, taking water. We were speeding into a train!
“Jump!” I cried. “Jump!” Fusee looked up from the fallen form of Highball and leaped to the engineer’s seat. He pulled back on the throttle and fumbled around, looking for the train brake to dump the air. For one brief instant, he looked out the window. All at once, he took my meaning.
I struggled forward over the coal load, fighting to get to Highball, but Fusee got to him first. He hefted the stallion into his forelegs, and then the two fell over the space between the cab and the tender to the hard ground below.
I lifted my eyes to see the spectacle of an empty engine cab. Number 3803 was racing forward to her fate without her master, and as I peered forward, I saw the horrifying sight of ponies fleeing from a caboose that sat dead in our sights.
The horror and fear in their eyes shot adrenaline through me. I placed my hooves across the edge of the tender and prepared to jump. I gave a great cry, and then I joined the birds.
May Celestia grant that I never hear a sound like that ever again. May she permit that the sights and sounds of a locomotive making splinters and shards of steel out of a caboose and reefer cars never meet my ears as long as I live.
May the sound of an engine losing her song–of an engine suddenly twisting her frame and lurching into the air–never meet me again… that I beg.
I thudded to the earth and rolled into the brambles and thorns at the side of the right of way. My eyes opened just in time to see the wreckage pile up beneath 3803, lifting her off the rails so that she did a ghastly pirouette against the sun of a summer’s day. She spun around amid the reefers of our train as they plowed into her. A great wash of ice, water, and red mash of berries flew across the scene as the water tower exploded under the weight of the engine that crashed through it.
Number 3803 wailed and moaned. She looked every inch a fine young doe being drawn down by a pack of white wolves, and the gore of her death struggle flowed over us all as a spray of water, steel, ice, and wood.
An entire wheel set came racing down the embankment not four feet from me, and a reefer rolled over, disintegrating itself and vomiting its cargo across me. I lunged forward on my broken legs, fighting to keep from drowning in the liquefied remains of the contents.
There was a vast groan, and a tangle of steel that was once #3803 came collapsing to the earth, spilling her fire across the right of way, a great cloud of steam escaping from her. Her torn boiler jacket thudded to the earth as she panted like a wounded animal, and shrieks ripped through the air from deep within her frame.
Suddenly, all was quiet. Nothing moved. It seemed, in those horrible moments that followed, that all of Equus was silently staring across the twisted wreckage that had come in the wake of the calamity.
“Can anypony hear me?” I whimpered as I fought my way out of the wreckage. My body shook in pain and I collapsed across a broken axle, my legs protesting every motion I made by shooting white-hot flashes of pain through my senses. I wiped the blood from my muzzle and lifted my head, trying to listen for any sound at all—trying to see or hear if anypony other than myself had survived.
As I surveyed the scene, something caught in my vision. My eyes fought to adjust through waves of pain and what would later be diagnosed as a concussion.
Still, what I saw before me played out in perfect, abject awfulness.
A figure crawled along the ground, pulling itself forward in disjoined motions as though the body was made up of distinct parts rather than a whole. I watched in disgust, attempting to figure out what it could be… and only when it spoke did I realize that it was a pony.
“Darlin'?”
It was Highball.
The stallion was swimming through the ballast, debris, and mountain of coal that still spilled slowly from the upturned tender.
“Darlin’?” he said again, his voice floating across the scene like a breeze drifting across ancient, forgotten places.
I watched in fascinated horror as he fought his way up the coal pile to where something sat shimmering in the sun. As I watched him the distant, plaintive cry of emergency sirens in Capital Transfer met my ears, and groaning forms began to emerge from amid the tangled mass of steel and wood like the dead rising from forgotten graves. I took some comfort in that awful scene… at least that meant that others had survived the carnage.
I lay slumped across the axle; darkness began to crawl into the corners of my vision. I watched as Highball struggled forward, drawing himself closer to the shattered hulk of 3803. Something shone amid the coal pile, and he wormed his way towards it.
He reached out with a bloodied hoof, wrapping it around the dismembered throttle bar. Burning embers fell from her firebox doors, the very life dripping out of his mare, and he lay amid the ruins watching as they dropped to the ground.
“Darlin’, I’m sorry,” he whimpered, cradling the throttle. “I’m so sorry.”
His frame collapsed on itself, the breath leaving his body—leaving his body still and quiet amidst the coal and wisps of steam.
I stared at him until my eyes went dark. I barely felt the hooves of other ponies upon me as I slipped away into a dark place… a tunnel in which there was no headlight to find the rails.
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 TheAlydar, 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.
I was the first firestallion to qualify on the new line to Baltimare.
It was something to see, that new line. It was free of most of the tight curves and heavy grades of the Old Main. The line cut through the land, showing off the power of the Baltimare & Ohayo Railroad Company with every freshly hewn tunnel, deep rock cut, and sweeping stretch of straight track.
I wasn’t too fond of it.
Oh, it was certainly an easier bit of railroad to fire an engine over—that was true enough. “What do you think of your new railroad, colt?” Crosshead asked me. I took a moment to ponder my words as we arrived in the station in Baltimare, Coltden Terminal. I looked out behind us, watching the string of passenger cars ease into the station. It was the first time I had run The Alydar down the new line, if I recall correctly.
“I suppose it’s mighty fine,” I said, noting the presence of company officials nearby. The proper ponies all looked quite happy with themselves. In truth, it was a real achievement, something for everypony to be proud of. But, to me at least, it seemed sterile. It cut across the land as though it was trying to beat it into submission. The Old Main flowed with the land, streams, and rivers that it followed; the new Baltimare District seemed to be angry at the very idea.
To me, it was just something to get used to.
To me, it was proof that Highball was gone.
Oh, he was still on the property. He had been given a desk job in the office, a place where he could still wind down the days until he knew that he had to retire…
…a place where he could be safe if another of the seizures struck him.
“Seems he wanted to get away from engines and trains and the whole like,” Fusee told me as we marked off after another long day. “I wonder why he did that?”
My head swung towards the back shop.
“I have a feeling that I know why,” I answered, nodding towards the side of the austere building.
Number 3803 had caused more problems for herself. Even being assigned to maintenance-of-way trains hadn’t been degrading enough for such a troublesome engine. Now she sat beside the back shop, a grimy pipe reaching out from her cylinders to the interior of the building. She could still hold a fire and make steam, and as such her boiler was put to work powering the machinery inside the shops, keeping other locomotives running even as the life dripped out of her. Once a day, the rusted wreck would be trusted to go only as far as the coal dock and watering tower. There she would take her rations before being returned to her new place of dishonor.
It was a death sentence. No more repairs or work would be done to the engine, and she’d serve as such until she failed once more. Once that happened, all that remained for the locomotive was a date with the scrapper’s torch.
“Damn it all,” Fusee said as he looked back at the sad sight. He swung his head from side to side, and his ears went down as though he’d been told that a loved one was dying. “Damn it all,” he repeated.
I’d used much more colorful language.
It had been the intention of the Baltimare & Ohayo Railroad Company management, in their divine infallibility, to scrap the Old Main and get some of their bits back in selling off the steel. The communities on the line had other ideas. They were already upset that the Baltimare District had bypassed most of the tiny villages in favor of the larger communities, but the idea of losing rail service altogether had set them foaming at the mouth.
Letters flooded the offices of the Ministers of Parliament, and the fate of the line became a matter of public discourse. The management of the railroad was caught with their stalls open—they simply didn’t know what to do. They gave us form letters to sign stating that we’d like to see the Old Main ripped up. But in a spate of job protection, any pony that had a union card made sure that these all ended up adding to the fires of our engines. I spent an entire run scooping one shovelful of coal and another of the damn letters.
In the end, the B&O agreed to leave the rails in place to serve what few industries and stations remained, but the line was downgraded. All that spring, weeds poked up through the ballast of what had once been the greatest achievement of Equestrian railroading. A smattering of local freights and bobbing, swaying local passenger trains now plodded up and down rails that had once held the great passenger limiteds and express trains of all descriptions and types.
This was the scene that met me as I began my sixth year in the employ of the Baltimare & Ohayo, which was my third as a firestallion. I was still bright in my mark—the song of the steel still spoke to me every time I danced the deck of an engine.
As much as I enjoyed my work, a cloud hung over everything that I did. I couldn’t get the image of what had occurred to Highball out of my head. Our marks… they make us who we are. The Seal of the Sister Sovereigns sits upon every pony, promising them that they have a purpose—that they are needed, wanted.
But I wondered, what about Highball? What about any pony who was too old or too sick to fulfill their mark?
“That’s something above what needs to be pondered, colt,” Crosshead told me one day. “It’s the sort of thing that we don’t need to worry about today.”
I, however, had always been the pondering sort, and as that first spring after the opening of the Baltimare District came and went, that question lingered in my mind.
Equus, though, kept right on spinning. Celestia moved the sun a little earlier each day, bringing summer into Equestria. But Equestria, it seemed, had better things to worry about than some colt shoveling coal on the Canterlot Division.
Better things to worry about indeed…
I remember waking up to the sound of somepony frantically pounding on my door.
I tumbled out of bed, my legs waving through the air, and fought my way through my few small rooms. My head swam, a fog of tiredness sat inside my mind as I went to answer the door. The pounding continued, and my imagination began to grant me images of doing unmentionable things with my coal scoop to whatever crew caller was at my home at this Celestia-damned hour.
The second I opened the door, the humid air of a summer’s night came pouring in. The look on the face of the crew caller stole out every trace of wrath in mine.
“We’re calling every railway pony in,” he blurted out, not waiting for me to speak. “Every railway pony has to get to the yard right now. Get your denims on, and get there as quick as you can.”
He was already trotting back down the sidewalk before his words settled into my drowsy mind.
“W-what’s going on?!” I called out.
The crew caller spun about, trotting backwards a few steps as he tried to answer me and keep on with his task. I can still see the shock and worry in his face as he took a few sharp breaths.
“We’re at war,” he said. “Equestria’s at war.”
He then turned around and pelted off down the street towards the next home of a railway pony. In mere moments, I was wearing the old, sweaty denims I had worn the day before, and was galloping down the cobblestone streets towards the railyard. I remember the stink of my breath hanging around me, and the first rays of my sovereign’s sun beginning to paint the summer sky in hues of pink and orange, signalling the start of a day of confusion and fear.
I turned down Sutler Street. I looked up and down the mainline, panting, careful even in my excitement not to get splattered at the crossing. I missed a step as I realized that every block indication as far as I could see in either direction was red, and trains filled the passing sidings and sat on the main.
Above me, the switchstallion in SBG tower ran his hoof through his mane, looking hard pressed and excited in the first rays of the dawning day. As I turned towards the roundhouse, I caught sight of something that I will never forget.
The early morning sun glinted off of armor, and every available space that wasn’t filled with railcars was filled with soldiers. My jaw came open. Archers, pikeponies, heavy infantry, light infantry, pegasus scouts… every type of soldier I’d ever read about sat in small groups or in line formation. Worried railway ponies shouldered their way through, racing to get to the trains that sat idling in the yard.
“Damnation, colt, ain’t it somethin’?”
I felt Bullpen pull at me, and in a moment we were standing off to the side, just beside the open bays of the roundhouse.
“W-what’s going on?” I asked again, repeating the same question I had asked of the crew caller.
“There’s a fleet moving against Baltimare,” answered a pony to my side. I looked up to see a large stallion in the full, grey steel of the regular army looking down at me. “Reports are that they fired on one of our airships.”
“Damnation,” I said. “Is that a fact?”
“Best as we know, yes. Now if you railway ponies can get yourself in order, we’d very much like to get to Baltimare,” he said, painting dire need into the words.
“We are working on that presently,” Bullpen answered. Together we shoved our way through the crowd as a sense of worry and unease grew.
Together we looked out over the yard from atop the roof of the roundhouse. It was filled with trains and ponies. There were engine classes that I hadn’t seen often in Saddleburg, even 4-4-0’s that only seemed to serve out west.
Amid them moved the soldiers of the Aspen Corps of the Tan Army Group. Some fifty thousand ponies jostled their armor and arranged their weapons as they tried to find their way into passenger cars, boxcars, refrigerated cars, gondolas, and even fell haphazardly into open-top hopper cars.
And there they sat. There simply weren’t enough engines to deal with it all.
I lifted my head towards the mainline, looking towards SDG tower, the spot where the Baltimare District left the yard. As soon as the block turned yellow, another series of whistle blasts erupted into the dawning sky and another engine would heave and strain to get a troop train underway.
It wasn’t enough.
Bullpen and I looked at one another, and then made our way cautiously back down to the ground.
“Where ya from, soldier?” I asked one of the armored ponies.
“Vanhoover,” answered a very distracted young stallion. I had been about to question him some more when Bullpen pulled me aside. A group of official looking ponies swept past us, and with one look between us, we followed behind, hoping to hear something that could lend light to the situation.
In a mere moment, I realized whom we were following. The mare was Dividend, the president of the Baltimare & Ohayo. The stallion was Fancypants, the Vice Chancellor of the Royal Parliament. Even though they could not see me, I doffed my striped cap in respect.
“I can only consider this a massive failing on the part of the Baltimare & Ohayo, Miss Dividend,” the parliamentarian answered. “Why did your company not take the offer of the government to build a second mainline track when the rail line was being constructed?”
“It is not the policy of the Baltimare & Ohayo to build for momentary emergencies, Vice Chancellor,” she replied, stopping to sign some papers that were thrown into her hooves and bark orders at the division superintendent—a rotund fellow that I never particularly liked. “Especially,” she added, “when we were not provided tax breaks to do so.”
“Ah, I see. So a body count is required instead,” Fancypants answered, venom dripping in his words. “This is what your railroad looks like at capacity? If only you had kept the older route in service, we could use that one as well.”
“The rails are in place,” Dividend answered with a sigh, smiling at soldiers and railway ponies alike as they pushed through the crowd. “After more than six months of being inactive, the Old Main to Baltimare could have any sort of problem. Celestia alone knows who could guess what condition it is in.”
In the corner of my eye, I noticed a ghost, one who slipped away from the assembly of ponies and into the dawning light of the day beyond.
I went into the yard office to find File Cabinet. Army officers had taken over his desk, and the stallion worked at his crew board while pikes, lances, and halberds of all shapes and types of unfriendly disposition hovered around him.
“I’ve got every pony on the railroad hovering around here, colt,” he said, looking at me over the top of his glasses, “but what I don’t have is space of the Baltimare District mainline, if the tower has anything to say about it. The telegraph wires are red-hot with dispatcher reports. The trains are stacked on top of one another.”
It was sobering news. Even at full capacity, and using freight cars of all types in place of passenger cars, there were still thousands of troops sitting in the yard awaiting transport to the city of Baltimare to meet whatever threat the ships represented.
I wandered back out into the yard. By some odd quirk of fate, I found myself not only among more soldiers, but also among Vice Chancellor Fancypants, railroad president Dividend, and their retinue once again.
“Is there no hope of using the older line to Baltimare?” Fancypants asked again, concern, worry, and exhaustion hanging in his tone.
“I can not guarantee the safety of the Old Main, Vice Chancellor,” she answered in a withdrawn sigh. “I would risk it if I knew of some way to know for sure if it was passable.”
I hung my head.
There had once been an engineer who knew that line like the back of his hooves. There had once been an engine that had plied her way up and down that line with a sure-hoofed grace. The three of them had been a perfect trinity, each one as comfortable with each other as a leg and a familiar, old denim jacket.
Now, when it seemed that they were needed the most, the trinity lay broken and defeated. My ears fell forward as I remembered those days on the Old Main. Something inside of me cried out for them once more.
It was as though I could see him in that engineer’s seat, the seat of his engine, with the Old Main opening up before him. His hoof sat on the throttle, and the three shared their secrets once more. It was as though I could hear her whistle once again.
My ears shot up.
I could hear her whistle… I could hear #3803.
My eyes panned down the yard tracks past the roundhouse. There, amid a parting sea of soldiers, came a ghost—an apparition from within the shafts of the dawning sun.
She appeared around the outside wall of the roundhouse, a cloud of steam emerging from her cylinders. She wobbled along the old, uneven rails of the yard lead, looking for the entire world like she was shaking off all of the rust and wear of her year of inequity.
“It can’t be,” said a familiar voice. I looked around to find Fusee at my side. “It just can’t be.”
I looked back up, afraid to even whisper the insane hope that was growing in my throat, forming a pool of acid in my guts. Down at the roundhouse, I could see Bullpen. His eyes went wide, but in an instant he gave a great big “Whoopee!” and spun around, kicking like a wild horse.
“It just can’t be,” Fusee whispered once again, his words catching in the ears of the politician and the executive nearby.
“Gentlecolts?” President Dividend asked, following our gaze down the length of the yard, joining us as we watched a familiar headlight grow nearer. “What on Equus is going on?”
“Ghosts, ma’am,” I answered. “Two of them.”
Number 3803 rolled to a stop just in front of the assembly. I winced, and then lifted my head up to face the cab, hoping and praying all the while that it could be true.
I opened my eyes. Highball smiled back down at me.
“Ma’am?” the old stallion said, more life in his voice than I’d heard from him since the accident. “I’ve been denied my mark, you see; I’m not supposed to run trains anymore. But, ma’am, you’ve got nopony on your railroad who knows the Old Main better, and you’ve got the best brakepony and firestallion standing there beside you. If there was ever a time to bend the rules a touch, I would say that it is now.”
Dividend stood there, staring at the stallion with the greyed mane and beard. She looked along the length of the rusted old engine that still held the lines of a fine racer. She looked back behind her and ran her eyes over Fusee and myself.
“How well does he know the Old Main?” she asked, looking us each in the eyes.
“He wrote the book on it, ma’am,” answered Fusee.
“They were made for each other, ma’am, the Old Main, the engine, and that stallion,” I said, painting certainty into my tones.
There was a slight pause, and then the words “very well” left her lips.
“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” Highball said. “Come along then, colt. I can’t keep this fire up myself.”
I handed him my coal scoop, and with that I lifted myself into the familiar confines of the cab of TW3a #3803. I removed my hat and bowed to the backhead as I did, greeting the lady once more.
Fusee lined the switches and we headed out into the yard, and three blasts of #3803’s whistle told all around that she had called for orders. She heaved and sighed a little more than I liked; it was clear that her time since the wreck had not been kind to her. Still, there seemed to be a special magic at work, and she held her fire like a mare as we waited for the signals.
I smiled to myself, imagining the faces of the dispatcher in SDB tower as he looked towards the ready track and saw 3803 simmering there. He must have almost dropped his binoculars, and seeing Highball at the throttle once again, I imagine his jaw dropped.
Soon we were lined up for a yard track. Highball leaned far out the window as we backed down to the waiting train. I gulped slightly as I saw what type of cars our train was made of. It was a line of white reefer cars, the exact same type as we had shattered in the wreck.
I looked to Highball, but I saw only the faintest hint of remembrance go across his face. It didn’t last long, and as we coupled to the train, it was as smooth as any I had remembered him making with any of the fast passenger limiteds we had hauled in his better days.
“You alright, colt?” Highball asked as he lifted his pocket watch out of his denim jacket. His tie and vest sat underneath. They looked almost too large for him now. His body had shriveled over the long year since the wreck. Still, he was smiling, and as the sunlight streamed through the cab he looked… happy.
“Yessir,” I answered as I wiped the back of my hoof across my eyes. “Yessir.”
The conductor was Brains, the one I had worked with back when I had earned my first demerits. The look in his eyes when he realized who was in the cab could have earned me a million bits in a photo contest. The two exchanged happy greetings, and then set about the work of professional railway ponies.
There was always time for polite considerations later.
There was always later.
Fusee finished hooking up the brake line. With our air check complete, he took his spot on the coal load, his lantern at his side. I worked the fire up. It was harder than I had remembered #3803’s fire to be, and the engine coughed and sputtered when I injected water.
There was definitely something wrong, something broken down deep, but at that moment I would not have had any other engine in the world. I would not have been with any other engineer.
The stub signal at the end of the yard lead switched from red to green, and the ancient semaphore signal that guarded the entrance to the Old Main swung up high, allowing us to return to its forgotten pathways.
Highball reached for the whistle and gave it a pull. Her tone sounded out over the yard as Highball set his hoof on the throttle and pulled it back gently.
Our hearts went into our throats as her drivers slipped, making the engine cab rock back and forth.
We stared at Highball as he closed his eyes. The engine was lesser now, and had not been serviced as it had when it had been his fine lady. The slip wasn’t his fault, but in that fine tradition of all the great engineers, he did not blame his tool.
“Darlin’?” he said. “It’s me. I’m terribly sorry about what happened. I’m powerful sorry. If you’ll have me back, I promise to be good to you once more. Do you forgive me?”
Highball ran his hoof up and down the throttle bar, and his other hoof found the power reverser. There was a little sand, a little steam, and with that, #3803 took the load of the train, and we began to depart the yard.
He gave me a nod and a wink. “Just got to treat her like a mare, is all.”
A cheer went up from the troops in the reefer cars behind us as the slack came in and the train began to move. Soon troops in the rail yard joined in as well, if only as a way to release some of their jangled nerves. Highball leaned out the window again, and as he saw Brains wave his lantern, he knew what it meant…
… it was the highball: the motion that had given him his name. ‘Make all possible speed,’ it said, and he answered it in full.
We were already making more steam as we passed SDG tower at the north end of the yard, and the dispatcher and towerpony both waved to Highball. He answered as I looked back behind the train. In the yard, other trains were being lined for the Old Main as well.
We were the pilot. They would match our speed. We were the litmus test—the canaries in the coalmine.
I looked at Highball. He looked like a million bits.
The Old Main was pockmarked with venturesome weeds, and the shoulder of ballast had come off in a number of places. In the morning sun, we could see paint already starting to peel off of the stations that we roared past; crossing shanties sat quiet with nopony to come out and guard the roads from our thundering presence.
The line had been downgraded, that was for certain, but the trinity had been restored. Highball kept his eyes ahead, and that same sense of amazement that I had felt when I used to watch him ply these rails settled into a warm spot in my recollections.
“How is she steaming, colt?” I heard him ask from across the cab.
I didn’t want to lie to him, but the truth was that 3803 was working harder than I ever imagined she would. Still, she was alive. She was doing what she had been designed to do.
“Just fine, sir,” I said with a nod. “Just fine.”
There was steam coming from places where it should’t be, and the pitting and rusting of her gear showed itself clearly. Still, right now, the engine was working, and there would be time to take care of those things later.
There was always later.
The day had bloomed around us as we raced north. The sun was fully in the sky now, and as we approached the little villages like Steeplechase, more and more ponies were gathering at trackside.
It was only afterward that I learned that they had not just come to support the soldiers. The wires overhead were buzzing with the news of the grand old engineer’s return, and ponies came down to see Highball and #3803 as we whipped along. Station agents emerged at each of the villages, waving us on. Some of them even took the time to hoop up order forms that were filled with glad tidings.
Still, there was a deathly seriousness to what was transpiring. These soldiers were racing forward to face a threat to Equestria—to meet an unknown foe. I looked out of my window on a curve, holding my striped hat against my head with my hoof. There I saw the soldiers leaning as far out of the reefer’s door as they dared, each one searching the horizon for some hint of the threat that awaited them. A grim look hovered in each of their faces, uncertainty and doubt hanging in their expressions. I returned to my work, shovelling that much faster.
The scope of the undertaking made itself clear as we reached Harpist Ferry. There, in a narrow stretch of the river, I could see trains behind us on the Old Main as close as the block signals would allow. My eyes panned the river below us and my jaw fell open.
The new line, the Baltimare District, was also alive with trains. Their headlights probed the valley floor where the sun had not yet reached. Across the river, our rival, the Western Mareland Railway, also was doing its part. Its main was covered in a blanket of steam and soot. An entire Equestrian Army Group was on the move, and the railroads were answering the call.
The railway ponies were at work, and we raced forward, fighting against time itself.
I only ever winced when we approached tunnels. I knew that if the line had suffered from deferred maintenance, then boulders and rock falls inside the tunnels was where we’d catch it.
The ghost of Moonville Tunnel seemed to be on our side that day, and as we came through that tunnel we had no problems.
That was, of course, until Highball hit the air brakes hard.
The train slid along the rails, and a spray of sparks erupted from where the wheels and the rails suddenly found themselves in disagreement. I bounced against the backhead, and the handle of my coal scoop speared me in my chest, driving the breath out of me.
When I was able to pull myself together, I looked out the window. The train had slowed, but it had not stopped. Behind me, I could hear the snap-hiss of Fusee lighting one of the devices that shared his name. The bright purple-red light of it filled the cab, and as he tossed it out the side of the engine, I could see why he had.
The tracks dipped to one side. Six months of low maintenance had done its job on the Old Main, and now the roadbed itself had paid the price.
“Ain’t that something?” Fusee said as he watched for the caboose to throw a flare of its own, warning the following trains to slow down. “They’ll have to fix that later.”
There was always later.
My eyes went to Highball. Once again, the way that he could “feel” the rails on this line had saved us. He had known, I told myself. He sensed it before we came up to it. He knew…”
Highball. Number 3803. The Old Main. It was something to see, and until the end of my days, I’ll always remember watching him work his magic across that river of steel. I’ll remember how his engine sang in tune with his gentle guidance.
He was a true Wabash artist, and as he guided the troop train down the last few gentle hills before Baltimare, I watched him conduct his little symphony. He and his engine sang their song of steel, and I simply kept the tempo up with my fire.
He leaned back, one hoof came up to rest on the backhead. His foreleg rested across it, his hoof placed in its prescribed place on the throttle. There was a small smile on his face. His grey eyes looked far out ahead, clear and bright as the railroad opened up before him.
His mark was alive inside him again. That made me very happy.
I shovelled some more coal into the firebox, checked my water levels, and then stoked up the trim some more. She wasn’t keeping her fire well, not as she had. I attempted to ponder this all, but I put it aside. This would be the end of #3803, no matter what. She was already coming to an end, and no amount of wishful thinking could solve that. She was broken deep inside, but that was something to worry about later.
There was always later.
“Damnation!” Fusee hissed. My head came up, and my eyes instantly flew across my gauges. Nothing seemed wrong, so I turned to face the brakepony. He took one look at me from atop his perch on the coal pile, and then pointed down the length of #3803’s boiler to the city beyond.
“Drag me to the Well,” I whispered.
The steeples and towers of Baltimare stood out on the horizon, and the great bastion of Fortress Longshanks stood at the gates of the harbor as it always had, a huge Equestrian flag flying from its flagpole. But in the distance beyond, amid the blue of the ocean, was something that stole out our breaths.
A vast fleet of ships stood at the horizon. Terrible black sails erupted from the waterline, and on them were markings of a type I’ve never seen before and hope never to see again.
“Celestia preserve us,” Fusee said.
“Now, ladssss, don’t you pay too much attention to that,” Highball answered. “Let’ssss just get the train down the hill and into the cccccity asss sssooon ass possss…”
A painful silence filled the cab, and all of the beautiful hopes that had come with seeing Highball back in the right-hoof seat drifted away on the summer breeze, flying away as so much ash and soot from 3803’s stack.
Fusee and I stood there, motionless, gazing at Highball.
The old stallion wiped his hoof across his face a few times. He looked out the window to where nothing but the cut of the grade met his eyes. We watched as the stallion took deep breaths, and before we could even move, he began to slump forward in his chair.
“Colt?” he whispered. “Colt!” he called in a stronger tone, fear welling in his voice.
My coal scoop fell to the deck of the cab, and at once I was holding him up.
“Colt,” he whimpered. “Am I ssslurring my worrdsss?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Oh dearrr,” he said, leaning forward. I sat down beside him, and his chest fell across my shoulder. “Oh dearrr. Dearr, dearrr.”
The malady that had driven itself deep inside of him was returning, draining the life out of him again. I did my best to support him as whatever light had found its way inside of him that day dripped away. The sharp edges of a railroader came out of his eyes, leaving only a dull grey. His frame seemed to collapse upon itself once more, just like he had in his chair at Ms. Pillow’s boarding house.
He looked beyond old. He looked beyond saving.
“Fusee,” I called over the sounds of the cab. “Keep an eye on the fire.”
Fusee rolled off the coal load, his hooves clattering across the steel of the deck. I watched him as his eyes went across the gauges. He swallowed slightly, acknowledging the fact that he was in unfamiliar territory.
I sat there, at the right-hoof seat, as Highball continued to wane. His breathing became rough, and he opened and closed his eyes over and over, as though hoping that they would somehow reset themselves.
But no clarity came, and whatever sickness had planted itself within him, be it magical, mental, or physical, strengthened its grip.
“Colt?” Highball asked, his voice hovering in a shadow, barely audible above the sounds of the engine around us. “Colt, did I ever let you rrrun her? In the time you sssserved with me, did I everrr let you rrrun herrr?”
“No,” I answered.
His head wobbled back and forth, and I pulled him up tighter, afraid that he had lost consciousness. His eyes came open, still fixed on the mainline ahead like a proper railroad pony at his post. “I think it besssst that you take the thrrrottle, colt, it’sss bessst…”
“Finish your run, Highball,” I said. “The company only pays three-quarter time for split runs.”
My hoof came up. I placed it over his, and 3803 guided the troop train into the suburbs of Baltimare. I held his hoof to the throttle, helped him find the whistle cord for the ample grade crossings that filled the city.
As we passed towers and section houses, railroad ponies that had been listening to the telegraph came out to see us, cheering for Highball as we roared by. Tears filled my eyes as I realized that they were unaware of what was happening in the cab.
The ancient covered roundhouse passed by on our right as we slowed for the yards, but to our surprise, the semaphores all read “approach caution,” and Fusee leaned far out the cab to catch orders that told us to head down Prance Street, the old trackage built right into the very paving stones of a busy city thoroughfare that brought trains into the very heart of Baltimare.
The yard tracks were already filled with trains; Coltden Station had every passenger track stacked two-deep with trains. Soldiers streamed out of yard and station alike, falling into the long lines of their regiments. Flags flew in the hooves of color sergeants, and military music filled the air as we slowed to make our way up the tracks that lay flush with the cobblestones of the street.
“Colt?” Highball whispered. “Colt, I can’t find the brakesss. Help me find the brakes, colt…”
I lifted his other hoof and placed it gently across the air brake lever. He patted at it a few times, and as he did, I told him how close we were to the end of the line. The light had come out of his eyes, and his little glasses fell from his face, the wire frames getting tangled in his beard.
“I can’t see, colt,” he stated, passion absent from the words. “I can’t sssee…”
“About fourteen car lengths… seven, six… three, two…” I said.
Highball brought his train to a stop at the very edge of the Inner Harbor, having no farther to go unless the company didn’t mind fishing cars out of the water. At once troops began toppling out of the reefer cars behind us. In the noonday light, I could see the Sun and Moon Pendant, the flag of Equestria, flying high above Fortress Longshanks in the distance.
It was a massive flag, perhaps the largest I’ve ever seen. I didn’t think on it much at the moment though, for I had other concerns.
The soldiers formed into their regiment, and sharp cries filled the air as pegasi wheeled through the sky seeking out commanders and delivering orders. The calls of officers bounced off the buildings of the Inner Harbor. Behind us came more trains, mixing their staccato chants of steam and steel into the cacophony.
But there in the cab of that engine, all had fallen into silence. The military bands that were lifting their martial airs around us may well have been playing on the moon. In the heat and steam of that cab, all that existed was the trembling, heaving form of the old stallion that I held against my chest.
“Well, look at that! Look who decided to bring a train…” called Crosshead as he bounded into 3803’s cab. His eyes fell over us, over the heaving form of the old engineer and myself, and he, too, went silent. Brains, the conductor, and a few other railway ponies from the Baltimare Terminal had come pelting down the street after us as well, hoping to congratulate Highball.
Instead, they joined us in the coal-strewn cab as Highball's breathing became more struggled, as the light of his mark faded from him.
“Somepony get a doctor, damn it!” called a young brakepony. “Damn it, call a doctor!”
“There’sss no call for that…”
Highball’s voice, though timid and retreating, filled the cab with his meaning.
“There’sss no call for that,” he repeated. “Colt? Colt, I can’t sssee… I can’t breathe.”
“I know,” I said, holding him a little closer. “I have you.”
The assembly looked on, each one coming as close as they dared. Muffled voices passed news down to an assembly of gathered railway ponies that stood below the right-hoof window.
We lingered like this for a few moments until a rending sound cracked through the air. At once, the cab bucked and kicked, and the light of the fire disappeared. Hot coals went tripping down the ash pan and into the cobblestone street below, making the ponies who stood there dance their hooves in alarm.
The sounds of steel groaning and twisting continued for a moment, and it felt for all the world as though she had stiffened, held herself high in pride and dignity… and then collapsed to the cobblestones in a heap. With one last pant—one hidden, ladylike gasp—number 3803 dropped her fire and fell into ruins on the streets of Baltimare.
It was obvious now, in hindsight, what had happened. Her frame had been split deep, and the way it had shifted and buckled back and forth on itself in the months since the accident had caused all of her ailments. Like a lady, she had hidden her age and faults. Only now that her groom was leaving her did she bare all and finally collapse upon herself, spilling out her life across the cobblestones, dying hard.
The cab was slightly tilted now, and the firebox stood at an odd angle. Her back was broken. She’d never run again.
“Colt?”
“She’s gone, Highball. I’m sorry… she’s gone.”
He was trembling, shaking. His hoof came up and waved through the air. I tried to grasp for it, but soon realized that it wasn’t me Highball was searching for. Through his dimming senses, there was only one thing he sought.
Fusee realized it too. There was a harsh metallic ring, and at once the lynchpin that held the throttle to the backhead went pinging to the steel deck. He lowered my coal scoop, now slightly dented, and gave a powerful grunt.
The eyes of all in the cab followed Fusee as he handed me the shorn length of steel. I pressed it into Highball’s grasp.
“Here’s her throttle bar, Highball,” I said, leaning down close to his ear. “Here it is.”
His body spasmed with tremors… and then his breathing relaxed a little. He held the bar close, cradling it to his chest. I felt him tense, shudder, and then became almost unnaturally light. I watched him close his eyes, taking the cool grey of his sharp gaze out of the world.
“Thank you, colt,” he whispered. “Thank you.”
Two more breaths.
“Proud of you, colt…”
I held him for a few moments longer, there on the dusty, coal-strewn cab deck of his engine. I held the greatest railroader I had ever known as wisps of smoke and steam hovered amid the ruins of the cab. I held him as he faded away.
I removed my striped cap and placed it over my heart. The other railway ponies did the same.
The streets around us filled with soldiers, and brass bands played their songs, unaware of the drama that had just transpired nearby. Overhead the great, vast flag stood defiantly on a lifting breeze, one that carried the last few curls of steam and smoke away from the engine and far into the bright blue sky on intangible currents.
Life moved on.
Whatever race it was that manned those black ships with their black sails thought better of any notion of invading Baltimare. No doubt the sudden appearance of three army corps dissuaded them from any tomfoolery. The railroads had done their part, and as such had proven their importance once again.
At the heart of it all were the railway ponies, those who had run the trains up and down the Baltimare District and the Old Main… and, yes, the tracks of our rivals the Western Mareland, too.
Business picked up in Baltimare over the following year, and as such the Old Main came back into service as a mainline, working in tandem with the newer route. The stories weren’t done being told, and the line would play its part in the tales of my career as it unfolded.
I wasn’t done doing dumb things and seeing good railway ponies die, if the sad truth is known.
I fired engines up and down the Canterlot Division for years after that, and even made enough seniority to train for engineer. I was furloughed at certain points when traffic fell off and became a bummer, working railroads across Equestria. I even took a spell as a hobo, once, hopping freights all over Equestria. But railroading was in my blood, and I always came home to the Canterlot Division.
As I guided trains up and down the Old Main, I couldn’t help but stop and think about how I had first experienced this line and the old stallion who had shown me what it meant to be a railway pony. I think I developed a sense of the rails of my own, and I’m at peace with the lessons he taught me.
Number 3803 didn’t last long. She was cut up within a few days after the emergency. She’s gone, as are many of the engines of that era. Newer, bigger engines serve the Baltimare & Ohayo now, but some day they too will be so much scrap.
We treat steam engines as living things, and it is right to do so. We know that they are just things, and as such they will wear out and meet an end. Still, with the way they heave, sigh, breathe, and ‘speak,’ we can’t help but think kindly of them, and to this day, whenever I hold a new razor blade, I can’t help but wonder if there is some steel of that grand lady in my hoof.
Not all of her went to the heap, though.
Her throttle rests with Highball.
I’ve always been the pondering sort, and as most good earth ponies do, I believe that there is a Well of Souls where all ponies go when our runs here on Equus come to an end.
Still, I’d like to think that it’s more pliable than the traditional vision of it, you see.
I’d like to imagine that there is a Happy Valley Railroad. I’d like to think that somewhere in that ‘ever after’ a young stallion pilots a TW3a class passenger engine down an immaculate right-of-way. I like to think that her bright work is all shiny again, and that as he races towards an unknown station, that engineer leans back against his seat, his cool, grey eyes settling across an endless horizon.
Heh… it’s nice to think about, anyway.
For the railway ponies that work the more mortal and physically substantial railroads of Equestria, life goes on.
Names fade from call boards, and union meetings are faithfully recorded and instantly forgotten. We lift ourselves into the cabooses and cabs of engines. We lift our hammers and coal scoops. We hand in our reports and wipe the grime of coal dust from our denims… and then Celestia lifts the sun once more, and we do it all again.
As we do, the land grows fat with produce to harvest, businesses thrum with prosperity, and ponies travel home to the welcome embraces of their loved ones. The railways and the railroaders who work them make it so.
I have always thought that if there was ever a stallion and a steam engine that were made for one another, then it was old Highball and his longtime partner, #3803.
They were made of the same stuff, and any railway pony that laid eyes across the engineer as he tended to his locomotive would soon come to see it. They were made to serve together, to be together, and as fate saw fit… die together.
I guess it was for the best, that they had both lived to see one last bright moment… that he had filled his mark one last time. I think that was the answer to my question: You never outlive your mark. It burns bright until the last moment. What railroader could ask for more?
I’m older now… smarter, wiser, greyer. My legs still pain me on humid days. A litany of new scars, scrapes, and pains have joined them, but I’m still here—still dancing the steel deck of engine cabs, just like I knew I always would…
… just like Highball.
For us railway ponies, life goes on. We sling trains up and down the mainlines. We lift trains up and down the grades and send headlights searching through the night as passengers dream in the sleeping cars.
The rails call to us, and we sing their song of steel.
