vulcan railway series

T'mas The Tank Engine
by Railway Historian Sadryk W'teblir

T'mas is a tank engine who resided at the terminus of the North Western Railway surrounding Sucal Meidirem. It was a six-axle shunter powered by a coal fire, with a tractive effort of 9.478 gigadynes owing to its 44.45cm x 66.04cm inside cylinders and wheel/crank ratio of 4.1538. Its boiler was 754 centimeters long and quite wide at that, and neither its smokestack nor boiler reached all the way to the top of the loading gauge, giving the locomotive a generally short and stumpy profile. Due to various mechanical inefficiencies owing to its archaic design--a necessity in the early days of the Surak era--it had a reputation among the men and women who crewed it as "fussy," even behaving illogically. We will suppose, for the sake of these crews reputations, that they were correct, and not being illogical themselves in this assessment.

T'mas was primarily utilized as a station pilot, pulling passenger carriages out of sidings and connecting them so that the larger engines, not suited to frequent reversing moves due to visibility issues caused by their tenders as well as their screw reversers, could save time and proceed efficiently. When a train would come into the station and the vulcans would disembark, T'mas would move the empty carriages away to provide the crews of the larger engines some time to maintain their engine and prepare for the next train.

T'mas had a reputation among the bigger engines too. Logically, of course, an engine seen as fussy to its crews would seem cheeky to the other motive power on the railway. T'mas would pull up aside another locomotive while in the middle of a shunting move, and signalled a loud warning whistle, awaking the great locomotive from its slumber with a startle.

It seemed to like nothing better than to do this to Sordok, the biggest engine on the railway.

"Wake up lazy-frames," we might fancifully imagine T'mas to say, "and do some hard work for a change." And then, like a small child learning to play, it would run off laughing. "You can't catch me!"

One day Sordok had pulled into the station late with the express train it always headed. It had had to run faster than usual to attempt to keep to the timetable. While it rested in the sidings, T'mas pulled alongside and whistled loudly, startling the engine and its crew in the middle of scheduled maintenance.

At the end of their shift, Sordok's crew held a meeting with a Fit Director, T'Robe, explaining that there is an incompatibility between the operational protocol of the station pilot and that of the engine crew.

"It is illogical," Driver T'yir said, "for maintenance to be done in a hazardously loud environment."

"Furthermore," Stoker Spiv said, "the whistle signals being performed by T'mas' crew are illogical and incorrectly applied."

"I will look into the procedures," the Fit Director said, "and query T'mas' crew."

The next morning, while the shop crews tended to T'mas' fire, T'mas' crew spoke to the Fit Director. "Explain your reasoning for giving inappropriate whistle signalling while making switching moves on track 3L."

the driver and stoker looked at eachother briefly. Little showed on their face, but T'robe could tell there was a hint of an eyebrow moving in step between them. "Out loud, if you please, gentlemen."

"It's a mechanical flaw in the locomotive," the stoker said.

"The whistle has to be quilled at the station platform, but the whistle lever is in the center of the cab. At just the moment I must reach for the brake handle to take a set on the airbrakes, the whistle must be blown. Due to the geometry of the cab layout and my own anatomy, I have to blow the whistle in advance of operating the airbrake. Any other order of operations reduces efficiency."

"I see," T'robe said. "A logical order of operations. I shall tell Sordok's crew they will simply have to use ear protection."

Of course, the crew's explanation was an excuse, but they didn't expect T'robe to believe the entire truth, which was that an apparent mechanical flaw lead to the whistle blowing all by itself despite no bump in the track.

The engine crew returned to T'mas, but the firelighter had bad news. "Due to resource management changes, we were not allocated oxidizing powder, and the coal is of poor quality. It has been difficult to get the fire started, but there is 10 atmospheres of pressure remaining from last night."

"We'll use that pressure to take it out of the shed, work the engine, and draught the fire," T'mas' stoker said.

"T'mas lacks a wide enough firebox for pure airbreathing, but it could be worth an attempt," the firelighter said.

"I am a very skilled stoker," the stoker said.

T'mas groaned as it left the shed, lethargically. The regulator wasn't behaving quite right, and so T'mas ended up bumping into the passenger carriages. It sounded nearly like they were groaning in pain, and you could almost imagine T'mas to have said, "Come on, hurry up," as it chuffed hard to draught its fire.

By the time T'mas had prepared the coaches for the express, the fire was roaring, true to the stoker's word.

Now to understand what comes next, you must know that a steam locomotive does not have a constant tractive effort when starting out. There is a tractive effort curve as each set of cylinders begins and ends is piston stroke. Naturally, the point at which a locomotive will tend to come to a stop will be at that dead center point where the tractive effort is lowest, and so starting up a heavy train can be difficult. T'mas was usually used to help the big engines accelerate at first, but would always be uncoupled first so that it could return to the station.

Today though, there was a delay getting the coaches to the station. "More expediency would be appreciated in future," Sordok said.

"Expedite yourself," groaned T'mas.

"Yes," said Sordok, "I shall."

As the coorbital planet T'khut eclipsed the Sun into a brief second night and the clock struck the hour, Sordok started off.

"Pull harder!" T'mas barked through its chimney.

The train slowly began to move out of the station. Then the train accelerated faster and faster. But when T'mas' coupler went out of compression and into tension, it noticed the problem, and its clanking and groaning became more emotional.

T'mas tried to stop, but it couldn't. "We'd empty the air from the entire train, where's the logic in that!" The stoker said.

"T'mas is not designed to maintain these speeds. The running gear could sustain damage. We have to apply the brakes and stop," the driver argued.

"Illogical. Consider: We can simply uncouple the engine, as we should have done to begin with."

"There would be no way to inspect that the brake pipe is undamaged. Passenger carriages are not designed for moving drops like this," the driver said.

"If we uncouple, I estimate a roughly 5% chance that brake pipe damage will result in the train stopping and being late. If we remain coupled and stop the train, we will certainly stop the train and it will be late. If we do not uncouple or brake, the likelihood of permanent damage to T'mas' running gear is over 60%."

There was a pause as the driver considered this.

The carriages clicked and clacked. Perhaps to T'mas it sounded like they were chanting "you can't get away! you can't get away!"

"Pull the coupler lever," the engineer said.

"I can too get away!" T'mas said.

Because modern railway couplers were designed with automatic fittings for steam heat, mechanical connectivity, and brake line, and can be operated from inside the cab, this was a trivial measure, and T'mas slowly pulled away from the passenger carriages, until it came to a stop just beyond the station limit. It reversed back to the station platform, and continued its normal shunting moves with only a mild delay.

T'mas suffered no permanent damage and learned no lesson from this incident, thanks to high quality, logical engineering standards.