"Yes, but often they are much smaller. Usually the larger the wheel, the faster the steam locomotive can go, roughly."
"And you want to build such a thing in real?" Johannes Evander, the mayor of Weimar, asked from behind.
"No, not in the next ten or twenty years. Locomotives that big weren't built in the old timeline before the 1880s. That's over fifty years after the first train ran.
"Here," he took the much smaller model of a Climax from a branch line. "This is roughly what I have in mind." The geared engine had two trucks with two axles each, and the wheels were much smaller than the Hudson's.
"What you can't see here are gears under the original engine distributing the power evenly onto all eight wheels. This type of locomotive runs smoother on bad track and doesn't strain the tracks as much as a normal 'rod' engine. It could even run on wooden tracks with special wheels."
"And what are these colored engines?" Bruckner tried to come forward. "They have no chimneys."
"We had three different types of engines up-time." Marshall took a large red V200. "This is a German Diesel engine. It ran on oil like the APCs you all know.
"And this,"-this was a green Swiss Be 6/8-"has the nickname 'crocodile,' and was originally driven by electric power like all the model trains here. Do you see the rods on the top? They take the electric power from wires above where it can't hurt people."
"And why," Andreas Gompracht, Oberster Ratsmeister of Gotha, wondered, "don't you build electric trains? Electric power is much cheaper than coal."
"We'll do it, just not now." Marshall pointed to the electrified track, where the crocodile had run before. "The wire and the poles supporting it must be made of lots of copper and steel, and steel is our scarcest resource in the moment. Moreover, each of the smaller locomotives needs about twenty tons-four hundred Zentner-of steel. The bigger ones up to a hundred tons. It's simply not yet available.
"They'll need an enormous amount of electric power, so we will have to build larger power plants before we can start to electrify the lines. So, we'll have to stay with steam for now."
Higgins Hotel, Grantville
The next day
The Conference Hall in the Higgins Hotel was bursting at its seams. Not only with the delegations of the Thuringian towns, which the new railroad line was supposed to connect, but also delegates from many other villages had appeared.
The Ernestine dukes had a small entourage each; and that meant at least twenty more people. Even some envoys of the Catholic Church from Erfurt had shown up, although all of the archbishop's properties in that county had been dispossessed by the Swedish king.
Marshall had never encountered so many people in such a small location before. The plan had been to reduce this run by meeting far away in Grantville, but the need to announce it publicly had spread the news widely.
Okay, I've put up with worse things.
Melchior appeared in the small side room. He had checked the big names on the list. "They are all here. And 'all' means-"
"Yes, I can see it. At least one man from every farm along the prospective route."
"Yes, and from even farther away. But the invited guests are all here. We should begin now." His face showed a little impatience.
"Oh yes. Cross your fingers!"
Melchior frowned. "Why should I? There are no witches here; at least I hope not."
"What do you Germans do to wish someone luck?"
Melchior folded his thumbs and closed his fingers around. "Press the thumbs."
"Okay, do it. I'll need it."
****
Marshall marched to the speaker's desk, and tapped on the mike several times. Partly to check its function, and partly to silence down the audience.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he started in English by custom. Then switched to German. "Meine. Herren." He corrected himself as he saw that the room was solely filled with men. "My name is Marshall Ambler and, on behalf of the shareholders, I want to inform you all of what we have planned since last summer."
He turned and nodded to Melchior. The young man pulled at a rope, and a curtain opened before the back wall.
Now everyone could see a large map of central Thuringia. A black line connected Jena with Weimar, Erfurt, Gotha, and Eisenach; finally ending at the Werra.
In large letters, the title "Jena-Eisenach Eisenbahngesellschaft" stretched over the whole map. Below this title, the map showed the coat of arms of the five towns and the three Ernestine duchies-now states of the NUS.
"This is our target: We will build a railroad along this line. The towns and people whose coats of arms are shown here have signed the company contract today. All of them bring estates or cash into the company, and there will be a bond to raise at least another ten million dollars from everyone who is willing to invest into the future of Thuringia."
Millions of questions and answers later Marshall threw himself onto the couch in his apartment. The shareholders and prospective investors were still discussing what they had learned during the buffet at the hotel, but he had excused himself. The air had been getting too bad for his allergies.
The itching reminded him how everything had begun. In the early 1970s after returning from Nuremberg where he had worked for the U.S. Army he had started teaching engineering and drafting in Fairmont. There he met the newly divorced Janice O'Keefe, who shortly afterwards became Janice Ambler, and then he moved to Grantville.
They wanted to have children, but it didn't work. And since Janice had two already from her first marriage with Dennis Haygood, she blamed Marshall.
Oh, not openly, but he could see how she more and more kept a distance from him, and more and more dived into her work. With the deterioration of their marriage, began the deterioration of his health.
First came headaches. He had examinations but they couldn't find a cause. Then his skin began to itch at different places. He had more examinations, and allergy tests, with again no results.
When he started coughing every time he entered the school building, he decided to quit his job in Fairmont and teach in Grantville's new tech center.
The next step down came when he noticed that the itching and coughing and the headaches all got worse whenever he met Janice.
Okay, he thought, let's visit a couch doctor. Perhaps all his woes were psychosomatic, derived from an emotional problem.
Some thousands of bucks later, he noticed that nothing got better. One of the other doctors had spoken about "Multiple chemical sensitivity." That meant a kind of super-allergy against everything, but nobody else believed that this disease even existed.
Whether this was true or not, it could only get better when he tried to avoid all possible sources of chemicals. This included scents and bleaches in clothing detergent, tobacco smoke, perfumes, and so on.
In short, Grantville and his wife. He asked Janice to stop smoking, and she did it. He asked her to stop using perfumes, and she did it. He asked her to stop using scented detergent, and Janice exploded.
"You hypochondriac, you idiot, you- Do you think the whole world turns around you? Can't you even consider another person beside yourself? Best you hide in a cave and let the entrance collapse."
Since he also could not prevent cars from driving through the town, he quit his job in the Tech Center, moved into the basement of their house, which already contained his model railroad, installed an air washer and airtight seals at the doors. Fortunately, he had a part-time job writing a regular column for the Industrial Engineer, and there were enough mail-order companies to keep him alive.
The doorbell rang. At first, Marshall didn't want to get up, but then decided otherwise. Only few of the people at the hotel knew where he lived. It was not probable that one of them would appear now.
When he opened the door, Janice was standing there, an embarrassed expression on her face that he hadn't seen for several years.
"Yeah, what do you want?" he asked.
"To talk with you. Can I come in?"
With a big g
esture, he invited her. She hadn't been in his apartment since-was that in 1995? Three hundred sixty-two years from now. A long time.
She sat down in an armchair. He sat down on his couch again.
"So what?" he demanded.
"I saw you at the hotel. Not directly, but on tape."
"And?"
"You looked well. You look well. And you looked happy. It seems you've found something."
Marshall smiled. "Thanks. Finally, I've found something worth living for and working for. Is that, what you came to say?"
"Marshall, I know we got on poorly the last few years, and we both know that we are both to blame for it."
Then she saw him frowning. "Okay, I admit, I'm to blame for a big part of it. I buried myself too deep in my work, after you buried yourself in your apartment-or your sickness buried you-be that as it may.
"But you should have looked yourself in the face in these years. Even now when you opened the door, you scowled at me. I simply ran out of steam." She laughed ironically when she used that figure of speech in front of the big model railroad.
"And what is your point?"
"My point is that I am happy when you are. Really. You were never happy during the last ten years, and me either, every time I saw you. I'm not saying anything about getting together again; that train has definitely left the station."
Now both laughed.
Janice had to have the last word. "I wanted to tell you that from my point of view, you're on the right track."
Marshall laughed, rose, and extended a hand. "Truce?"
Janice rose too, and looked astonished at his hand. "Since when are you shaking hands again?" Then she smiled, took his hand and pumped. "But yes, truce!
"And now tell me about your Don Quixote adventure, your fight against the windmills, and the kids you saved from these bandits, and adopted afterwards."
Marshall grinned. "I had no idea how that would go around.
"I wouldn't call them exactly 'adopted,' and there isn't really that much to tell. I visited them yesterday; they live with a German family and go to school. Since I was constantly traveling, I haven't seen them all that much.
"Now that may change. I'm in charge of the R amp;D facilities of the railroad company in Jena now, so I can come over on weekends."
GrantvilleTechCenter
Next morning
"Yes I know," Marshall admitted. "I should have stayed longer."
Ambrose Salerno scowled at him while nodding.
"Hey," Marshall continued. "It was end of school year when I left. I finished everything I had promised. And in the meantime so many down-timers have arrived here able to substitute for me. You have the real living William Oughtred here. You don't need me to teach the children the usage of slipsticks.
"You know that I didn't feel well. My asthma was getting worse, so please don't scowl on me. Now what about my proposal?"
Ambrose Salerno's furrows got deeper. "The whole senior class, you want to employ them?"
"For one thing, it's not me; it's the railroad company employing them. And for another thing, of course only those who want to work for a railroad company in Jena. But we need as many surveyors, civil engineers, machinists and so on as we can get; people with ideas and people who are not infected with up-timer attitudes."
"Ha!" Ambrose shouted, "As if your attitudes are any different."
"And that's exactly the point. If you, and I, and the West Virginian steam-heads start to build a railroad, we all know too well what can be done, and what can't be done. We know much too much of the history.
"If I had started the railroad company, I would never have thought about founding a virtually government-owned company. I would have tried to raise the funds with private investors. What would we have now? Perhaps a hundred lawsuits of people who don't want to give us the right of way.
"This is not the Wild West," he said, smiling at the memory of his own Wild West adventure. "It's a more or less civilized area. We can't send the cavalry to kill the Indians; the people out there have more cavalry than we do."
Marshall took a deep breath. "And the same with the technical aspects. At the moment, your youngsters know enough of what can be done, and nothing of what we think can't be done. That's the whole point. So perhaps one of them experiments and finds a way to propel our engines with air and dung; there's lots of both in this place and time.
"I wouldn't try that, would you? Do you know how many good ideas in the last centuries were simply forgotten, because they had as much cheap steel and oil as they needed?”
Marshal took another deep breath. Then a mournful expression appeared on his face. "Do you know how many great men live out there who are too young to have their life's work even begun and now will never do, because we Americans can simply tell them? Do you know that Vauban would have been born next month? The greatest technical author of the seventeenth century; what would he have written now?"
"Okay, okay." Ambrose lifted his hands. "You have a point there. I have no objection. We'll make a trip to your 'Lokschuppen' in Jena next month, and you can show them what you've got there."
Author's notes:
Quotes from the English translation of Don Quixote by John Ormsby (1829–1895), who did the notable task to translate the original of Don Quixote once and for all into English.
The first German translation was done in 1621 but not published before 1648. The subtitle of this issue says: Buy me and read me, if you regret, eat me or I'll pay you.
If I remember right, there was nowhere stated in the six million words of the 1632verse how fragmented Thuringia was. Apart from the four Wettin duchies (and Saxe-Altenburg alone consisted of seven separated parts), the two Schwarzburg counties and Gleichen, most were not even mentioned. The two Reu? families with a total of four different Herrschaften for example are partially in the grid, but never used. Big parts of "Thuringia" still belong to Saxony, or to several other distant owners.
The only map I found showing and naming all the different parts can be found here. You may count and prove my numbers stated in the story wrong.
Yes, the sentences Melchior uses in his letter are unnecessarily long and complicated, and yes, he uses Latin words unexpectedly, and yes, he announces his sovereign with an abbreviation (Y.H. = Your Highness). This is exactly the style the Germans of this time wrote their letters.
The Kramerbrucke in Erfurt was first built as a wooden bridge (first mentioned in 1117) which was already used as a market. Then it repeatedly burned down and was rebuilt. Finally in 1325 they rebuilt it from stone; they also built two churches, one at each end of the bridge. After another fire in 1472 houses were built on the bridge.
Neither of the two Bechstedts mentioned is the one near the Ring of Fire; they are both near Erfurt. The one with the historical Bockwindmuhle (open trestle post mill) is called Bechstedtstra? today.
Each farm in Germany had a name, normally arising from its original purpose. So the Waidbauerhof (woad farm) was once called after its primary product Farberwaid (this produced the natural indigo used for blue jeans) and afterwards every owner of this farm automatically gets the name 'der Waidbauer.' A potential son will be 'dem Waidbauer sein Hans' and afterwards possibly have the official name 'Hans Waidbauer' registered, regardless of whether the farm still produces woad or not.
"Bill Bo" is originally the main character of a German TV-show from 1968. It's the story (played by puppets on strings) of a robber chief in the Thirty Years' War, who wants to capture a castle with his gang.
The daughter of the duke dresses as a boy to enter the gang and spy on the bandits.
Bill Bo has his homepage here.
If you're interested in railroads and specifically in model railroads, there are two places in Germany you definitely should visit:
The first one is the DB Museum in Nuremberg, near the main station. It is the oldest train museum of the world, opened in 1899. The model railroad was opened in 1960, and that's the place where Marshall Ambler fe
ll in love with model trains, when he lived in Nuremberg.
The second one is the Miniatur-Wunderland in Hamburg, the largest model railroad of the world with one room dedicated to American railroads.
To be continued.
Art Director's Note: Thanks to Rainer for providing the interior art for this story.
Second Chance Bird, Episode Thirteen
Garrett W. Vance
Chapter Sixty-eight: The Ones That Got way
Port Looking Glass, December 15th, 1635
"They what?" Pam shouted, her voice like sharp metal.
Ulf, the Swedish marine who had brought her the bad news flinched, hoping that the American saying about "shooting the messenger" really was just a saying.
"They escaped, Captain Pam, in the night. They all got away, including the officers and that brute who had helped kidnap you." Ulf's voice was heavy with professional embarrassment. Even though the strapping young soldier had a full foot and a hundred pounds on her, he shrank back as Pam began pacing around her cabin in the grip of rage.
"How?" Pam tried not to shriek at the poor fellow, fighting to keep her voice even. Gerbald, Doctor Durand, and Lundkvist, the newly-minted captain of their captured French warship, Effrayant, looked on, all staying sensibly near the door.
"One of the French trustees did it. We haven't been watching them that closely since the doctor vouched for them." This made the good doctor wince painfully. Ulf gave him an apologetic shrug before continuing. "It turns out this one was still loyal to that Toulon bastard. He snuck up to the prison and cut a hole in the back wall. It was only made of bamboo. The civilians on guard duty were all asleep." At least he had managed to get that particular buck passed. Incompetent farmers trying to do a soldier's work, and failing completely!
Pam scowled mightily. Hot, stinking DAMN! Their real military guys were stretched pretty thin right now, with a harbor full of ships and a town to attend to, so it wasn't that big a surprise; even seasoned soldiers were known to fall asleep on guard duty, and it wasn't exactly a Sing Sing they had been running. Two more days and that evil bastard would have been hanging high. She had intended to pull the lever herself!
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