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engineer-gunzelpunk · 2 years ago

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VR H Class Pocono H220 Heavy Harry, the Antipodean Behemoth ("Red And Black Steam On Southern Metals" OC)

Once the bad boy prince of the Victorian Railways fleet, the heaviest engine in Australia; Heavy Harry of Newport Works was a marvel of Australian engineering, built to surmount inclines and run the breadth and width of Victoria. He was powerful, rambunctious and unique… sole extant member of his class, too heavy to take to any track other than the North Eastern line but did his job as a crack fast goods engine well, pulling 800 tonne consists with ease. He clocked over a million miles in his short career, making the earth shake and humans topple over in his wake.

In his day, he was almost as well known to the Victorian people as the Flying Scotsman was to the British, referenced in political cartoons and interviews in The Argus ... and then he simply vanished.

Gone.

Forgotten.

Alas, he almost scrapped along with thousands of others, stripped of his plates and headlamp and left for dead on the scrap roads of Newport Works with a deteriorating boiler. Even as he rotted and slowly lost his sanity on the scrap roads, he was a powerful presence.

He gained his reprieve in 1961, but he was shorn of his naivety; he never forgot the human caprice that laid him low. He is in constant physical pain from his deteriorated boiler which carries over into his human form.

“Heavy” Harry Jack Haining; Mightiest Loco in Australia, hooligan, Anarchist and every bit the picture of an Australian larrikin, an inveterate bogan who loves his beer, footy and smokes… who also happens to be gay and very complicated. And probably a daemon. Even he isn’t entirely sure.

(“Old Harry” is an old English nickname for the Devil, and ‘to play Old Harry’ means to bring ruin, chaos or destruction on something. Appropriate for a very, very angry engine with a habit of derailing and smashing into things during his working life.

Interestingly, a “Harry” in Norway is their equivalent of a bogan, or a yobbo, someone who is working class and vulgar. He finds this very funny. )

He lives over in Newport along with his best mate, the eternal cynic A2 Class No 986 "Pluto"; his brother in arms R707 Cerberus and his sister Andri, R 761; his adopted little sister Prudence, a K-class Consolidation; and the other locos of the Newport Railway Museum/SteamRail/707 Operations… but he is coming to prefer the Island of Sodor, though he cannot ever run as his engine self there or anywhere (boiler in need of replacement, lives with constant pain; also simply too big, the poor state of Victorian rails means he could so easily break them as he did back in the day) , so he goes there as human to visit his boyfriend SpookyHenry every so often.

#Victorian Railways #VR H-Class Pocono H220 “Heavy Harry”#thomasallgrownup #real locomotive OC #Red And Black Steam On Southern Metals #The Railway Series Down Under #GunzelVerse

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engineer-gunzelpunk · 1 year ago

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Locomotive Rights in Australia (Victoria): Part 1

(One of the patron saints of the Locomotive Rights movement in Victoria, VR S-Class Pacific S300 Matthew Flinders, who was scrapped before he could be saved. The scrapping of the S-classes spurred the IRL steam preservation movement in Victoria)

Here I am, riffing off @joezworld's posts about Locomotive Rights as they developed around the world. Here is my personal take on what happened in Australia in regards to this issue.

(Disclaimer: Needless to say this is all fictionalised and not to be taken as a comment on any historical personage or real life locomotive. No slander is intended, this is a headcanon extrapolating Locomotive Rights in the GunzelVerse, and the TTTE/RWS AUs I write about in them, "This Is Sodor: The Iron Age" and "Red And Black Steam on Southern Metals".)

(I use the term “Lokodammerung”, literally meaning “Twilight of the Locomotives” in regards to the mass scrapping of locomotives. The Great Scrapping seems too cold, while “Dammerung” has a sad and apocalyptic timbre, which I what I wish to convey.)

If I don’t cover WAGR(Western Australia), SAR (South Australia) or QR (Queensland) , its because they are not my special interest in locomotives and I don’t know all that much about them. My apologies for the exclusion and I will try to rectify it in the future with time and research.

The situation of the railway and locomotive rights in Australia is a very strange and complex one, coded in State’s rights, custom and ideology more than anything systematic. It would be best dealt with State by State.

In spite of the celebrity of NSWGR C-38 Pacific 3801, it didn’t translate into a proper acknowledgement of non-faceless vehicles as people in of themselves until the 60’s. And even then, it was not an even process. The push actually began in the States of Victoria and New South Wales separately and converged later.

Prehistory

Upon Federation, every single State had their own specific gauge, an expression of the fervent desire for independence of the colonies before they were brought together as one nation when Australia was made into a Federation in 1901. Attempts to bring the country to a single gauge failed as each state battled with open hostility to the idea.

In the specific case of the colony of Victoria, the Broad Gauge (known widely as the “Irish’ Gague at 5’3’’) had been decided upon but as BG rolling stock and locomotives were purchased, a change of leadership brought a change of decision as to what sort of railway gauges would be used. NSW decided upon Standard Gauge of 4 ft 8 ½ inches like what was used in Britain. Victoria in a fit of pique having already paid for their goods, refused to reconsider a change of gauge.

(The Victorian terrain also suited the BG quite well, the long, broad and steep inclines requiring a more stable kind of gauge provided by the BG).

Oz is also an enormous place compared to the UK. The State of Victoria alone is the size of Great Britain and around 2700 times the size of the Island of Sodor; the states themselves cover a lot of territory compared with states in the USA. Each is its own country virtually, which makes it difficult to organise, and with the difficulties in the per-internet age toward reliable communication between engines of different states (the old break-of-gauge problem!) , it was remarkable that a resistance movement got started… and started it did.

I will now speak mainly of the State of Victoria and it’s locomotives, as this is my tendency. Without rail, Victoria could have never have been the State power that it was.

***

It was said that by the late 19th century, a Victorian human was never more than 25 kilometers from a railway line, and this was thanks to lobbying by politicans promising lines to voters… and the locomotives that requested them. As the state and the railway companies were flush with Gold Rush money, they had plenty of cash to spend to do so. The famous “Octopus Act” allowed a virtual spiderweb of iron to embrace the State, creating a near total domination of goods and passenger traffic.

Thus the locomotive was able to range quite freely within Victoria wherever they pleased, and combined with strongly built depots the sizes of which eclipsed the fleets of the NWR (the North Melbourne Locomotive Depot alone shedded 120 locomotives, compared the the total number of locos at the NWR, which was around 80 at the same time before the Norf depot was demolished) developed a certain state of educated consciousness that meshed quite nicely with the tendency towards radicalism and trade unionism.

This was aided by the amalgamation of private lines post the Railway Mania era into the governments aegis, so branchlines remained open and ready until the local version of Beeching later on turned a lot of them into tramways.

Encased within their little Broad Gauge bubble imposed by the patriotic fervor of the colonies pre-Federation, locomotives could not be as easily replaced by out-of-state loaners. The early days tended towards foreign imports that were then used as templates to be built locally… and built locally they were as a matter of state pride. A lot of VR locomotives were built at Newport Works and at Phoenix Foundary, Ballarat.

The standardization plan brought forth under the reign of Chairman of Commissioners Richard Speight in the 1880's introduced five new classes of locos (A, D, E, the so called New R-class later renamed RY, and Y) that were built locally with the aid of Kitson and Co. of Leeds, England involved in the design phase, with the view that parts could be used interchangeably across classes.

This contributed to create a certain kind of mentality within the VR locomotives of a sense of separateness and self-sufficiency which cleaved with the ever present state rivalry with their Northern neighbor, New South Wales. The overall treatment of locomotives was one of a certain kind of affection, they were tools to be sure, but more than that. It was somewhat better than the British tendency to treat the locomotives as nothing more than iron pack mules, but this was not coded into law. Status of the locomotives was by custom rather than law, which was to have consequences later on.

For a time, things were very, very good for locomotives within Victoria. An American-railways inspired Railway Commissioner , Sir Harold Clapp (the Oz equivalent to a Director, as the VR was run by a board of Commissioners spoken for by a Chairman of Commissioners), the First Thin Commissioner, had been Vice President of the Southern Pacific railways in the US and brought heavy reforms to a VR seemingly stuck in the 19th century; amongst his ideas were the integration of American design principles to VR locomotives and rolling stock, creating a distinctly rugged look to the locos with their bar-frames and pilots as well as a general increase in size, to better fit the uneven terrain of Victoria with its regular inclines of 1-50, 1-44 and even 1-30.

The amiable K-class Consolidations and the sturdy, hard working Xs and N Mikado classes were introduced in this period.

This reached the peak of design with the creation of the mighty 3 cylinder S-class Pacifics of the "Spirit of Progress" fame and then Heavy Harry at Newport, who was meant to be the first of three other H-classes built for express passenger work across Victoria. The American inspiration can be seen in his rugged bar plate frame imported from the US, the specific use of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railway's name for the 4-8-4 wheel configuration, "Pocono" for him and his very strong resemblance in appearance to fellow 4-8-4s the NYC Niagara and Union Pacific 844 Living Legend. (The other two H-classes were partially built, then scrapped during the war. So Harry had two stillborn brothers, a point of lingering grief for the big engine.)

(For more info on the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western 4-8-4 "Poconos"", see here)

Classes tended to be modified rather than outright replaced, like the A and D classes (each went through at least 2-3 waves of modifications and were marked with special names designating them as such, such as A1 , A2 and Dd ) as a cost-saving measure and often lasted a long time relative to their cousins in Britain, such as the 1915 built A2 -class 4-6-0 No 986 “Pluto”, who was only withdrawn in 1963, even though the R-class Hudsons were sent from Glasgow to replace them in 1951. In their naivety, they never thought the humans could ever turn against them.

Unfortunately, Victoria with a change of Commissioners was to echo Great Britain in the bizarre way that steam was phased out and reforms brought in. Wartime Austerity and the increasing costs of running the railways were used as excuses for local "mad choppery".

Country lines deemed unprofitable were cut, maintenance was reduced and fewer and fewer services were run, which tended to alienate people from the railways.

The VR also had some people within it that like their UK equivalents, had a deep suspicion of socialism and thus sought to break the back of the trade union of drivers and firemen by literally taking away their locomotives, and replacing them with easy to drive diesels and electrics with easy to train drivers, with the excuse that they were cheaper to run, cleaner and just overall better.

(The railwaymen’s strike in 1950 was supported wholeheartedly by the locomotives of the VR, who’s maintenance had been sorely neglected in the post war austerities; the strong presence of the unions and their relationship with the bitter, fallen prince of the fleet-turned-radical Heavy Harry and the fact that an entire depot was claimed by the Communist Party at the country town of Donald gave them more impetus to phase out steam power).

Others genuinely did believe that the time of steam was passing and the future needed to be embraced. They didn’t hate the locomotives personally, it was just that they were deemed obsolete. The steam locomotives were relics, and relics didn’t deserve a place at the main table in a rapidly changing world.

So they had to go.

With no real legal protections that other locomotives had in other countries like the USA, Europe and the Soviet Union, the Victorian locomotives were vulnerable to the encroaching end. Custom and public affection by itself cannot protect against sanctioned injustice.

14th of July 1952 was the beginning of the end for steam in Victoria. The first diesels, the pug-nosed B-class had arrived in Victoria, were built by Clyde Engineering in NSW (ironically, the same home Works that birthed the mighty NSWGR C-38 Pacifics) from an American design. The complacent VR locomotives were caught by surprise by the lean and hungry diesels who were now bedecked in the same blue and gold livery as the S-class Pacifics, who’s time was running out quickly.

The Lokodammerung had reached the Broad-Gauge southern fiefdom and showed no mercy.

The fact that this left a lot of people unemployed, destroyed a lot of side industries that made up the railway (workshops, suppliers, etc) and the costs of conversion left them unmoved. If they didn’t care about humans, they sure as hell weren’t going to care about locomotives, even if they talked and thought as humans.

As if to underline the point with extreme sadism, the mighty S-class locomotives were withdrawn and scrapped with not a hint of ceremony or acknowledgement of their hard work. That the diesels were painted in their old livery served to underline the viciousness of the insult to the VR steam locomotives.

It was an ideological point clearly made even to the humans. The enginemen seemed to read it correctly and the locomotives felt it deeply, shocked that their lieges were to be the ones sacrificed as an example to the hungry god of Modernisation.

(The R-Class was often blamed in railway enthusiast circles for giving the VR an excuse to introduce diesels, but this is backwards logic placing blame on a convenient foreign imported scapegoat. They were ordered and then the decision to bring in diesels was made and excuses were built around their seeming lack of performance when they were abused and poorly treated.

As locomotives, they did not get the chance to show their virtues… as they were deliberately worked into ruin on grain haulage jobs they were never suited for by the VR, so by the time the preservation movement got their act together, only two of their number were actually in operating condition and only 7 of 70 were saved. That the R-class clan thrived in restoration clearly indicates they have had the last laugh, they outlasted the VR!)

To Be Continued...

#ttte #rws #thomasallgrownup #victorian railways #GunzelVerse #GunzelVerse Headcanons #weird train rants #ttte extended universe headcanons #ttte alternate universe headcanons #Red And Black Steam On Southern Metals #This Is Sodor: The Iron Age #ttte headcanons #ttte headcanon #thomas the tank engine #ttte au

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engineer-gunzelpunk · 10 months ago

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A Victorian Railway Legend

S-class tender at Seymour Railway Heritage Center

In Oz gunzel circles, there's a rumor that one of the last S-class Pacifics to be scrapped is buried somewhere on the ground of the former Newport Workshops.

Weight is given to the rumor by S-class parts used for other things like the oil tanks being used, tender frames being made into trucks and other things. But this specific rumor of the locomotive body of an S-class Pacific buried at Newport has never been verified.

This has spread to the locomotives of the Newport Museum Mob in the early days and the sad waifs of the scraproads. They hoped that if the S-classer could be dug up, restored and refired, that they would lead the steam locos back to glory like King Arthur.

Alas, this hope was crushed when they continued to be scrapped in their hundreds.

#victorian railways #real locomotives #GunzelVerse #thomasallgrownup #VR AU Lore #Red And Black Steam On Southern Metals

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engineer-gunzelpunk · 1 year ago

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Happy Pride to Everyone

Inspired by the two demons presiding over the marriage of the happy medieval gay couples in the previous post, I decided to do my own Pride Demon art featuring my two gay daemon monster locos, SpookyHenry and his beloved Heavy Harry, who looks ready to anticipate LGBTQIA WRATH Month.

To everyone celebrating Pride, enjoy! Stay safe in these dark times.

The original PriDE MONth image is by Veya:

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engineer-gunzelpunk · 2 years ago

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Red And Black Steam On Southern Metals (Victorian Railways RWS AU/EU)

The Island Of Sodor isn’t the only place with non-faceless vehicles.

On the other side of the world, on a railway network the size of Great Britain and every Victorian human is no more then 25 kms away from a railway line; the steam locomotives of the Victorian Railways live and work.

They breathe and suffer and love like humans; from Newport Works where many locomotives were built, to the notorious soot-caked North Melbourne Loco Depot and the 1-30 slopes of the high country at Cudgewa, known as ‘K-class Country’, and the ever stylish Spirit of Progress and The Overland; when the Oz version of the Beeching Axe and Lokodammerung strike their Broad Gauge fiefdom, their world is upended forever.

And the survivors must carry on as best they can.

This is an Extended/Alternative Universe existing parallel with the Island of Sodor and overlapping with This is Sodor: Iron Age, though the sweep of time is longer. It will feature humanisation.

The 'Red and Black' of the title refers to two common liveries, black for goods work, red for passenger work during the active days of the VR (with plenty of variation such as the blue and gold "Spirit of Progress" livery of the S-class Pacifics).

It will feature OCs of mine based on real life locomotives like VR Pocono H220 ‘Heavy Harry’, Hudson R707 ‘City Of Melbourne’ (but here called ‘Cerberus’), A2 4-6-0 No 986 (in this universe, ‘Pluto’) and others. And there will be some reference to real life personages.

These are fictional representations of locos and humans and no comment is to be inferred from them, or offense intended in their depiction.

There will be very heavy coarse language (like I said in my intro, the word ‘cunt’ being used will be the least of it) and adult themes, and be written in the Australian vernacular.

A lot of it will jump time as the mood takes me. They will be dated if possible.

#GunzelVerse #Red and Black Steam on Southern Metals AU/EU #gijinka #fanfic #fictionalised locomotives #thomasallgrownup

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engineer-gunzelpunk · 8 months ago

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Further SpookyHenry headcanons (edited with even more HCs added)

He loves his 2000 AD comics, "Nemesis The Warlock" and "Strontium Dogs" are his faves... loves "Promethea" for the art and occult content.

The shady criminal workshop that built him originally was likely located somewhere in eastern London, so he has a Cockney accent… which has flattened out somewhat but is still pretty distinct. It was a heavy mark of difference in the very early years against the Lancastrian, Scottish and general Northern leaning accents among the engines of the NWR.

He was never a Gresley, there were never any flawed plans stolen from Nigel Gresely’s workshop. That was a bullshit lie concocted by the fixer that tried to flog him from railway to railway to conjure an air of prestige for their ‘white elephant’ an to obscure the fact that his dodgy home workshop was just shit.

Very likely has Bipolar Disorder and CPTSD, no one goes though as much shit as he did (just in the 'sanitized' canon) without coming away with mental scarring. (For that rate, he hasn't forgiven his NWR tormentors, but he has no choice but to work and live with them... even in humanshape he can't simply run away. He's still a locomotive in body and soul owned by the NWR, with all the needs that it implies.)

All the tattooing on his arms and body is to conceal all the scarring he got over the course of his life previous to humanization, which was and still is a real source of pain and shame to him. He figures if humans can get ink to cover their scarring, why shouldn't he.

He's still a nature lover, but he's not a Hippie. (Nature lover does not equal Hippie). He's too angry at heart to be one. He also finds some of their ideals benign but the aesthetic appalling, the attainment of those ideals disappointing and a lot of their other ideas just plain dotty and impossible to understand as an engine.

His appreciation for nature is rooted in the fact it allows him to escape his NWR workmates for a bit, so less this:

More like this:

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) © Hamburger Kunsthalle

Two Men Contemplating the Moon, 1830

He finds it all fascinating, the cycle of life and death he is completely divorced from as a wholly built artificial creature.

#ttte #rws #ttte henry #thomasallgrownup #thomas and friends #SpookyHenry OC #GunzelVerse #GunzelVerse headcanons

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engineer-gunzelpunk · 2 years ago

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A note on humanised locomotive naming conventions:

On the Island of Sodor and on the Other Railway, it is very common for humanised locomotives to name themselves for the identified CME of the Works that have built them, ex. Ex-LNER A0 Pacific NWR #4 Gordon becomes "Gordon Nigel Gresley". This is appropriate for an intact locomotive society that places a strong emphasis on lineage and Works family.

In the VR, multiple classes of locomotives may be designed by either one CME or by the Locomotive Design Department as a whole, so no one designer is given credit unless noted. Also, given as after the Lokodammerung, the greater locomotive culture that is intact on Sodor has been completely destroyed in the VR post-1972 and the surviving steam locos do not belong to the VR, they belong to whatever preservation society that has purchased or adopted them. Therefore self-naming conventions upon humanisation post the demise of Steam are quite loose and idiosyncratic, and therefore should not to be assumed to be the CME or designer.

Heavy Harry has named himself for his past drivers than his designer, ("Heavy" Harry J. Haining) as has R707 Cerberus (Cerberus J. D. DePomeroy), while the older generation of VR locos will probably follow the Sudrian-type self naming convention if a designer is known (A2 No 986 Pluto is "Pluto Alfred E. Smith").

Names of known Works may also be employed (Vulcan, Kitson, Phoenix, Baldwin, etc), while some locos particularly associated with a particular Commissioner's era might identify themselves with them (i.e a D-class 4-4-0 may take the surname of Richard Speight, VR Chairman of Commissioners between 1883 and 1892).

#thomasallgrownup #GunzelVerse #headcanons #Red And Black Steam On Southern Metals AU/EU

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engineer-gunzelpunk · 2 years ago

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This Is Sodor: Iron Age (Gunzelverse human/transformation AU/EU branch)

“All things pass into the night...

Goodbye Horses! I’m flying over you…”, Q Lazzarus

The name the “Age Of Iron/Iron Age” is supposed to evoke the Ages of Metal in Classical thought, with the Golden Age being the best and the age of Iron the absolute nadir, a Dark Age. (Such phraseology is used in steam enthusiast culture with the term ‘Golden Age of Steam’ being a well worn phrase, so the reference to the ‘Iron Age’ is a darkly ironic answer to that.)

It's grimly ironic considering the primary metal that steam locomotives are made of and the fact that during the Lokodammerung ("Twilight of The Locomotives", my term for the mass locomotive scrappings during the Beeching Axe/Operation Phoenix), they were being reduced to this base component.

Given as the AU occurs during that particular Dark Age for locomotives, the 60’s and early 70s, I thought it would only be appropriate as a subtitle for it.

The locos when they become humanised start becoming wise to humans, what it is to be human and messing about with subcultures in vogue at the time (in Britain; Mods, Teddies, Rockers, Skinheads, Greasers, Hippies, Punks, etc, and in Australia; the Mods, Sharpies, Bodgies and Widgies etc.), for them its a second sort of adolescence where new info, new sensations flood their conciousness, new modes of being... and a potent new weapon in their survival against the scrappings.

#GunzelVerse #This Is Sodor: Iron Age #ttte humanisation #ttte gijinka #thomasallgrownup

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engineer-gunzelpunk · 2 years ago

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SpookyHenry Memorialises the Killdane Incident

Continuing the Killdane related shenanigans...

(picture under the cut)

SpookyHenry in human shape is pretty scarred, particularly on the left side; he's done what a lot of humans do with scarring.. covered it in ink. Doesn't show at all in his engine form.

#thomasallgrownup #SpookyHenry #GunzelVerse #This Is Sodor: Iron Age

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engineer-gunzelpunk · 2 years ago

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Children of Moloch (CW: Religious Bigotry)(A ''This Is Sodor: Iron Age" ficlet)

Summer 1965

Edward needs an overhaul after the Exploit where he busted up his entire left side, and Crovan’s Gate is wholly unsuited to such a task.

So the Fat Controller decides to send him to Crewe, and being as I know that place like the back of my wheel, I get chosen to take him there.

You must also remember that the Great Scrapping was underway and all the rumors had taken on an air of truth. I wanted to escort dear Edward and keep him safe.

BoCo is stern with me about not believing rumors of slavering diesels snatching steam engines out past Barrow and dragging them to Woodham Brothers. I humor him, I like him very much, but I get the impression he’s not quite understanding how afraid we all were.

The journey over there to Cheshire is thick with menace, with a lot of re-directions and very few pit stops for water and coal because BR in their wisdom decided to take those away in advance of our eventual demise, my tender is smaller because Sodor is small and I’m getting low on coal.

By the time we get there, I’m tired and hungry and need more water and I’m so, so nervous.

Edward looks so frail on my trailer truck.

I don’t want him to pass out so I keep trying to chat to him and talk about how lovely Crewe was.

Poor boy was so out of it, I couldn’t hear him above the clanking of my gear and my chuffing.

All of the diesels we encounter are smirking with triumph, or sneer at us. Even the friendly ones seemed to pity us.

A brother Black 5 wheeshes at me instead of greeting me and it’s a punch to the boiler. That hurt so very much, it still hurts to this day.

It gets really, really weird when we make a stop and a diesel, a Deltic, passes by us. He stops, glares at us and then starts yelling some kind of bizarre sermon,

“Behold, ye Children of Moloch! Listen well, your reckoning is at hand! The fire prepared for the devil and his angels is set for you at Barry!”

“Are you alright, mate?”, I say to him as politely as possible though I want to deck him.

“Speak not to me, Tophet! Iron demons of the Satanic mills...for the time of your reign shall end. Look upon your betters and despair! Behold the evening star and die! Bedamned teapots!”

It was time for us to leave and we could not leave quick enough. Who was this Moloch character we were the children of? Who was Tophet and why did he call me that?

I couldn’t ask Edward or my driver and fireman and by the time we got to Crewe and saw all those friendly faces and the safety of those berths, we were both shot to pieces. All I wanted to do was bask in the good memories of this place.

But my brother Black Five wheeshing at me tears my heart just a bit.

I’d almost forgotten after I was coaled and watered for the journey back in a day or two when I asked Driver who was Moloch.

He said it was someone from the human religious book, whatever it is called. That he ate babies and was evil. What did that have to do with us?

Why is that diesel ranting at us from a human religious book?

I try and ask Edward but he’s exhausted and spooked out because he hasn’t been to Crewe before.

I wished I could stay with Edward for longer than a day because even the warmth and safety of Crewe was nothing to the pit of vipers outside.

There is no Lady in this place.

I wish I did have the absolute faith in Lady the little Skarloey engines have, but I don’t have that luxury.

Not with my history anyway, I’m sure you all remember.

Even Crewe seems to be a dim light guttering in gasoline-drenched dark.

Maybe this Moloch character is here.

Why are we “Tophet”?

A friendly little works diesel that shunts Edward into a berth greets me. We talk a little bit, which makes me feel better and I ask him who it was, he doesn't know his name but he knows about him because other engines coming to Crewe, steam or diesel, get harassed by him; he’s scared of him too.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We were not to know that that idiot diesel that raged at us was brainwashed by his fanatically religious driver into believing that we were iron devils that were the spawn of the demon that ate children in his firebox.

Or that he himself was as dispensable as we were…

We only found this out when we talked to Bear about such things, around 3 or 4 years later. He knew of this diesel, and he was called “Berk” even by steamie-hating diesels because he was such a cunt. He would harass everyone into his weird cult.

When 15 or so years later, when we were scavenging in human form the Newmarket Scrapyards for locos to rescue with FC2’s blessing, under the pretext of finding a good-sized freight pulling steam engine (our cover was that we were railway enthusiasts looking for a BR 9F or an LMS or WD 2-8-0 for our railway , the idiots didn’t twig) ; we saw his shattered carcass piled atop other withdrawn Deltics.

His eyes were completely empty, as if resigned to his fate.

We saw that look so many times; from locos in scrapyards, from rescues that come to the NWR after having been purchased. That flat deadness that comes from losing all hope.

We didn’t exult in this horror.

But I did not feel sorry for him either.

He was only too happy to see us in that position; crippled, shattered and longing for death.

I was not at all happy that he was actually in that position.

Just goes to show how empty hatred actually is.

That fire that was prepared for us was now ready for him, we saw that titanic smelter-crematorium in full fire; we saw it devour coaches, we beheld it and were terrified.

Moloch.

A god of sacrifices.

Tophet.

An awful place of sacrifices.

We asked a worker what was going on that they had to burn those poor coaches like that.

“They’got asbestos, mate! No good for pullin’ anymore and cannot be left about! No good for scrap either, so they have to melt them so that the asbestos hurts no one!”

We had asbestos boiler cladding way back when but that was replaced by another more innocuous kind of cladding called mineral wool when it became known that asbestos was a killer.

At least with us, we could be cleaned of it; those poor coaches had it built in them.

Did the Deltics have asbestos, I wonder?

Does it matter?

He was so sure he was indispensable that he arrogantly prophesied our fate as if he had a direct line to the god of the humans.

He was so bloody sure that the cutters torch would never touch him.

That the Tophet would not devour him.

Where was his ‘god’ now?

Where was his fanatically brainwashed driver?

It turned out he killed him in an accident, and the Deltic berk was written off. The man went to his god and left his machine behind.

And as the BR decided that Deltics were too much trouble and too expensive for upkeep, they started withdrawing them.

Their reign was shorter than the reign of the BR steam locos.

What a waste of machine sentience on bigotry.

Absolute Berk.

#thomasallgrownup #This Is Sodor: Iron Age #GunzelVerse #henry #edward #CW: Religious Bigotry

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