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slowly reading through my loooong interurban book and we are off to a good start for Sprague (Boxcab!Rusty). They actually did start as an unregulated bubble industry parallel to the heavy railroads that were yeehaw and confrontational with them and had a cartoonishly optimistic viewpoint pre-highways. Kind of a funny/terrible reason for a somewhat later electric engine to be a cynical doomer and put off by relentless optimism. Sprague vs Jet McGinnis/Electra in general face totally opposite circumstances where one was dramatically burned by private industry being too optimistic and feeling impervious to failure, and the other by government being aggressively cynical and setting them up to fail.

also lol Ohio was a major epicenter for them. Sprague will absolutely be from there.

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I think any and all Electras react badly to Red 40 and nobody truly knows if it is legitimate or something they just convinced themselves of

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I’ve mentioned it deep in posts before, but I still stand by my weird conspiracy theory about the London-Broadway changes. Steam engines being explicitly banned from the city in the early 1900s for very legitimate safety reasons was TAUGHT IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN NYC at some point in time and is relatively common knowledge there, absolutely harpooning the original show’s concept.

(I also stand by that they should have had Electra burn an effigy of Robert Moses because THAT is how you do an actually accurate double meaning that works whether they’re ~really trains~ or not)

Rusty and/or Poppa getting banned from the NYC show for war crimes (chemical weapons because steam engines gassed people in tunnels surprisingly often) is terrible and hilarious. The mental image of a train Geneva Convention banning them (and Wrench for the red cross thing).

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ngl I am curious if the 80s Party in Germany performing some old songs is putting out feelers for potential changes. God please, killing any of the Pearl ballads or I Am Me for the nostalgia choice would be such an upgrade. The first 30ish minutes of the show needs more upbeat songs so bad.

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Greaseball: Oh no I’m balding :(

Electra: You just need to embrace transhumanism and

Greaseball: Electra, no.

Electra: Wig. Wear a wig.

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Electra: “Oh no Volta I’m fading away from consumption! Each breath draws closer to my last!” *falls dramatically in her arms and wheezes*

Volta: “you are literally the furthest thing from every aspect of ‘consumptive chic’. you don’t even have eyelashes. you didn’t even catch any mysterious disease, you were raised downwind of a chemical plant.”

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I am weirdly impressed by how search results for Frank Sprague are so LLM slop free, early electrification and trolleys are just SO unattractive to The Algorithm. It is both aggravating and hilarious that electric trains would get mischaracterized as “computer bad” when they are so, so, SO the opposite in reality. The topic gets overlooked so much people don’t even make slop of it.

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Sometimes I like to bounce around the idea of the most cartoonishly miserable fantasy interurban railway for Boxcab!Rusty. I thought about including Gary, Indiana as a cheeky MJ reference but wait. That’s just the irl South Shore Line, that actually exists.

The mythical “train from Timbuctoo to Kalamazoo” has potential though. There’s a tunnel in the book and uh yeah, you’ll want to electrify that if it’s long enough or the book will end halfway when they pass out and/or die from carbon monoxide poisoning. Kalamazoo is in Michigan, Timbuctoo can just be in Ohio somewhere because kids these days would find that hilarious. The line definitely stops by the Detroit salt mine because kids these days also love mining. We can throw in a fictional Crapper company town that makes toilets somewhere. Maybe a town called Big Beaver where Floozy Chemical poisoned the water supply. There’s probably a sad little trolley park in Timbuctoo with a carousel, old roller coaster, even older skating rink, and rare animatronic band. You know what, there’s a lot of funny miserable Rust Belt things kids would unironically eat up.

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I’ve bounced around ideas for cyborg AU Electra who is… kind of the opposite of Cyborg in many ways, zero qualms about being machine-supported, they deal more with the practical issues of high-reliability machinery and having to hear endless bullshit about “computer bad” and robot overlords when they just want their heart to beat correctly and not get botched when they need repaired.

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I may sound facetious when I say Electra even takes bad-faith abstract art seriously but it’s based on a real guy who has about the same vibe as my mental image of older Electra. Jarringly young-looking, has that particular mix of animistic tendencies and fondness for repurposing things that I think is an important cultural aspect of Trains in general. It’s also part of why I think Electra gets along well with kids, they’ll play along with even the most absurdist of kid media and take its weird conventions seriously.

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Mentally I like the idea of Caboose and Electra taking a cute bath together but then I remember “oh no toaster bath but with legs”

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If anyone has specific requests for whump/sickfic of toothpaste Electra I’m open to them

Willing to work off most human ailments and semi-realistic train ones, also fine with most clunky 80s animatronic/cyborg stuff

Scenarios or specific features/focuses are wide open. My only hard no is making the character predatory.

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As much as I’ll die on the hill that being average-tiny is more accurate for an electric locomotive, I like how tall thin Electra can look onstage. I just see those ones as EMUs since THOSE are usually longer and lighter/weaker but more agile than dedicated engines. Still works with how the races only involve pulling one other car (motor/unpowered trailer duo is common in EMUs) and in some ways the Components are conceptually more multi-unit coded with them being “parts of a whole” in some versions/interpretations

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”ah yes I love projecting on characters”

“Electra likes digging through vintage/thrift shops looking for random designer stuff”

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imagine if Electra had an inhaler to pointedly puff whenever the show tried to make combustion power/fossil fuels out to be an “oppressed underclass”

honestly Electra being asthmatic would be a hilariously rational villain motivation in general

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I like how my friend’s first response to the Rap was to get incredibly offended by the Hoppers’ shorts, imply that Greaseball and Electra should double head Pearl, and ask why none of them have helmets

“time to eat cake with a rake time” is also a gem

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having the less literal whump idea that human Electra would be sensitive to pollutants or have medical issues caused by them. Works out well to electric trains in the US mostly being in Rust Belt/northeast where it’s a prevalent issue and one of those big, often statistically invisible reasons why rail electrification is genuinely important