#i’ve talked about the nuclear flask thing before but an actually realistic one is perfect for stex

[catenary-chad]

Feverishly writing out my wildly Americanized Stex reimagining concept. So much goes the way of “Immer pünktlich” in that it works so well in ways it was never intended to, and makes no sense outside of one regional audience (and people who have physically gone there by train)

I need to iron out some stuff but hopefully I’ll post the whole concept soon. It would be moderately sacrilegious, but also weirdly bring it in line with how the Railways Series was written (heavily rooted in how trains actually were at the time). While also providing some surprisingly elegant solutions to some long-term problems the show has, and implement a lot of stuff it’s tried to do over the years in really clunky half-baked ways.

“Starlight Express, Are you real, yes or no/I don’t want you to go” goes from “haha train god” to “passenger trains nearly vanished from the US altogether after WWII largely due to the government’s actions and those are genuine reflections of that”. The fundamental thing is you need to totally rewrite the Starlight Sequence to be about “you alone are an engine not a train” and emphasize that banding together as a group is the actual way to make systemic change (and also one of the main strengths of trains!).

Just saying, in the 80s (and even now) a steam engine as the high-maintenance celebrity who’s a neutral but obstructive figure with an entourage who follows them around is a fun and accurate depiction of mainline excursions (and the problems they cause can so fun and versatile to explore)

And New York City is right at the epicenter of where passenger rail was repeatedly set up to fail by the government, and how dated and worn out many electrified lines are is perhaps the most visible and vulnerable symbol of that.

A kid playing with a mismatched train set half consisting of their grandpa’s decades-old rails and wiring and wondering why the new engine they got for Christmas doesn’t work well is a very on the nose depiction of Amtrak in the 70s-early 80s. They think about what to ask for their birthday, toy cars? Planes? Tanks? And then a funny crowd of voices yells “TRAINS!”

“Coach sexism” becomes actually compelling in the context of how the position of US passenger rail and women in the workplace vaguely correlate post-WWII, the steam heat/head end power changeover around the 60s-80s is an underrated metaphor for orientation (and give Pearl even more depth as a glass slipper if you make her a then-new Amfleet car), and with an electric protag you can finally replace Hydra/Dustin with a nuclear flask and have it make a ton of sense. It feels like they wanted to make him nuclear coded so badly with how he’s shown as a green-hued, sinister-looking, but heroic alternative energy, but it’s total sci fi to apply it to a steam locomotive.

Oh yeah, it’s also a blank check to bring back Slick and/or barely-modified Trucker Caboose, along with a lot of other popular old things that suddenly fit again (Dinah’s Disco, OLC Belle, There’s Me)