Chapter 1, Rivers, Flashbacks, and secret codes

I walked along the track, kicking at the ballast. It seemed like I made this walk so often now that it almost was a weekly routine.

It had been a hard week, no thanks to the decision makers upstairs, and I needed to escape everything for a while and clear my head. I had been walking for a while but I finally made it to where I wanted to go. I looked up to see the railway bridge that spanned the Dragon Tooth River.

River was a little bit of an understatement, though, as it was almost 200 ft in width.

The bridge was just over 350ft long and 17th high. It had been built when my Grandfather, Hotbox, had been a kid. That thought made me think about the old man. He had brought me to this same bridge so many times in the year past, that it had become part of my soul.

I remember coming here many times in the past to think when I had something big to think about, like when my friend was in the hospital with a broken neck after getting hit hard in hoofball to get the league winning touchdown.

He did get it though.

And of course they're were the multiple times I had come here with my High Schools friends to use the deep river below it as our own private swimming pool, with the bridge as a high dive. It was an incredibly stupid idea, and there was more than one time someone hit the water wrong and broke something, but that was what me and my friends were like back then, idiotic dare devils who thought they couldn't die.

As I walked down the steep bank, gravel slipping under my hooves, I went back to the many times I had climbed down this same gravel with my grandfather. We would watch the water flow as we talked and caught up, because I didn't get to see my grandpa as much as I would have liked to back then.

I would talk about the different things I had been doing at home to fill the time between school, and he talked about what had been going on in the railyard. I was brought back to a time not long after I had turned 9 and we were having one such moment.

He was talking about the new additions to the engine roster, “Finally management got their heads on straight and bought us a couple new freight engines.”

“What was wrong with your old ones?” I asked.

He turned to me, “Well the old 4-4-0’s and 2-6-0’s aren’t bad locomotives, and we’ll have ‘em around for a few years yet before the go to yard duty. But we need to get more freight over the line faster, and to get up the old grade, you’d need to double head a ¼ mile long train to do a decent speed. With these new engines, they've decided to start doing 3/4 mile trains. Still need to double head to get over the old grade, but these new 2-8-2’s will be able to do line speed up the grade with a 34 on their back easy.”

I always thought it was funny how my grandpa and his railway buddies talked, they had gotten tired of saying ¾ of a mile, so they just said 34, ½ was 12, and a mile was 100.

It was about then we heard the sound of a two sets of cylinders working hard, and the sound of two locomotives thundering down the single set of tracks.

My grandpa got up from where he had been sitting, and climbed up the gravel, poking his head over the top of the embankment. He then chuckled, “Well speak of the devil, here comes two of them.” I looked up at him, and listen as the sound of pounding pistons grew closer, before a scrambled from the rock I had been sitting on, and ran up the bank to where my grandpa was standing.

When I popped my head up, I saw that in the near distance, there were two locomotives, side rods flying as they pounded down the rails.

Now, just to clarify, my home town, Tall Tale, was on part of the Celestial Pacific’s line between Hoofington and Vanhoover in the Smoky mountains. My hometown, and home yard are based about 10 miles from the start of the grade the railway used to get over the mountain range. The grade on either side of the mountain were incredibly steep, 1.7% coming up from Vanhoover, and 2.1% coming from Hoofington, and had been built so long ago that the line had earned the nickname of, "The Old Grade.". The grades took a beating on the locomotives that climbed them, often making them behind schedule. So, the flat area at the summit of the mountain, that spanned  a total of 10 miles, had a 65mph speed limit, that engineers always used to make up lost time. So it didn’t surprise me when I popped my head up to see two brand new 2-8-2’s racing down the rails, definitely going 60+mph.

As the train grew closer, to the point you could see the Engineer sticking his head out the window of the cab, my grandpa threw him a salute. I knew what this meant, and him and I were some of the few left who did.

It was something the engineers had come up with back when my grandpa was new to the railroad. It was a sign of respect the engineers had for each other, much like soldiers in the military. Being a railway worker back then was a dangerous job, not that it isn't today, and the men who worked on the lines felt they should have some sign of respect, so they came up with a system. They used the standard military salute, and if an engineer saw this, he blew a whistle code to acknowledge it, short short, then a long whistle going low, high, then a quick back to low.

Only the Engineers, firemen, and other railway staff who really cared about their jobs, who really were family to the railway,  were taught the code.

If someone who didn’t know the code saw the salute, the just saw it as a nice jester. But the ponies who saw and knew how to respond, knew that the pony they were staring at was truly part of their family, and was someone the could count on. There were very few who knew about the code at the time, as most of the engineers who had started it had retired.

But I swear that I saw the engineer of the front 2-8-2, #618, smile as he blew the whistle code as he passed me and my grandpa as he thundered out onto the bridge. The engineer in the locomotive behind him, #625, only gave a quick, high pitch blast, he had no idea what that little jester really meant.

I watched and listen in wonder as the two engines and their near mile long train blew past us and onto the old wooden bridge, the ground shaking as it passed. That had been the first time in almost a year, an engineer had answered my grandpa’s salute.

I was pulled from my daydream when the ground around me began to shake. I could faintly hear what sounded like six cylinders pounding away in the distance. I had only been working on the railway for seven years now, and driving engines for four, but I had never heard of such a thing as a triple header.

But then something clicked in my mind and I came up with a hunch. I stuck my head up over the embankment, and smiled at the sight that greeted me.

Since the time when me and my grandpa Hotbox had seen the new 2-8-2’s, more freight needed to be sent over the old grade, and that meant new, more powerful engines were needed to pull the ever longer trains without adding more locomotives to the front.

We had seen it all, 4-8-2 mountain types, 4-8-4 Hudsons, 2-10-4’s Texases, and now, the newest members to the fleet, the 9000 class 4-12-2’s.

These monsters had six drivers on each side, and sported three cylinders, pushing a tractive effort just under 98,000 lbs. And I was staring at two, double heading at least a 350.

I always loved watching, and driving these machines,. They shook the ground even from a mile away, and the sound of them could be heard far beyond that on the flats. These two were blowing smoke and steam everywhere as their combined 24 driving wheels pounded the ground at, by my guess, 55mph.

I watched them draw close, and as the numbers came into view, I saluted to the first engine, #9046. To my surprise, I heard the unmistakable whistle code come from both #9046, and the engine behind it, #9021.

This shocked me because there were only 21 other people out of the 3,000 who worked this part of the line who knew about The Railwaymen's code, or so it had come to be called. As the engines came within 20 yards of me, the engineer of the first engine poked his head out of the cab window, and threw me a salute with a big dumb grin on his face.

I chuckled to myself, the engineer was one of my good friends, Blastpipe, who had learned about the code though his uncle, and had been taught to respect what it meant and the respect for the railroad it called for.

As the other engine closed in on me, it’s engineer also leaned out of the cab and threw me a salute, his grin more one of a calm friend. He was older then me and Blastpipe by about 7 years, but he was one of the best friends a guy could ask for. His name was Ashpan.

I watched the two fly by onto the bridge and out over the river. I then noticed something, as they came to the middle of the bridge, the bridge started to creak more than usual and the locomotives along with there train tilled slightly right. I found this strange, so I waited for full length of the train, all three and a half miles of it, to cross the bridge.

Once the train rumbled off into the distance, I walked out onto the bridge and looked at all the ties as I crossed it. As I came closer to the middle, I began to notice something. The rails had started to sink into the wooden supports, and at some parts, the rail was near flush with the top of the beams.

“Well, that’s not good now is it.” I said in my head.

I made a mental note to talk to the yard manager when I went to work the next day. I turned around at the sound of an approaching train and quickly made my way off the bridge.

A few minutes later, the train coming in the opposite direction rumbled across the bridge. It was one of the older 4-8-2’s and it was doing under 10mph, it must have been waiting in the holding siding down the line for Blastpipe and Ashpan to pass. So I decided it could give me a ride back to my truck down the way.

And so I waited for the caboose to come into sight, and then hopped onto it.

The brakeman, Brakeblock, was another good friend of mine from High School, and had no problem letting me grab a lift, but he told me, “I’m not having the engineer slow down to left you off.” I just smiled at him, “You know I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

We both laughed, him knowing I was a bit of a dare devil, always doing stupid stuff. We talked and shared a few laughs on the five mile journey back to my truck, but by the time the signal box I left my truck at came into view, we were doing 40mph.

I got up and walked over to the back of the caboose, stepping onto the steps that were used to get into it, and stopped on the last one, my hooves hanging just a few feet from the speeding ground. “Don't kill yourself!” I heard Brakeblock yell just before I jumped. I threw my him a salute, quickly saying, "What makes you say that?" and then jumped from the caboose.

I hit the ground and rolled to a stop in a few seconds, only hitting a few loose pieces of ballast in the process.

I looked up after I stopped moving to see the train speeding away into the distance, Brakeblock at the railing at the back of the caboose, saluting as he and his train sped away, back toward Tall Tale.

I just got back onto my hooves, waved to the signalman, and got in my truck. I pulled a piece of paper from a pad that was lying nearby, and wrote a note to myself about the bridge, before starting up the truck, and speeding off down the road, determine to catch back up with the train I had jumped from, just for the hell of it.