#next to “fund passenger rail or you’ll end up a car hellscape” my next biggest message is “track is whack do literally anything else”

[catenary-chad]

I’ll revise/add to this in the larger fic it’s a part of but this is a good description on how I’d view things post-canon (40+ years later, around the present day or a few years later). Mainly in terms of Greaseball’s position and view of Electra after the guy kicks the bucket. tl;dr he gave it up for the heritage/corporate train life years ago and thinks Electra’s perpetual number chasing is a sad losing battle

Greaseball watched Wrench drag the dead engine down the line to the museum.  Dead, not sleeping, not preserved.  There was no Snow White revival for him.  He’d heard the news.  His frame was so cracked it was almost a wonder he didn’t self destruct on the rails, and his transformers were drained when their oil was outlawed.  There WAS no way of repairing him without basically making a new engine.  They’d just repaint his faded shell and place it next to the husk of Big Red, like taxidermy figures.  

Greaseball was far out of his home territory and never felt right out east.  It was too flat and small compared to the wide open ranges and mountains out west.  But at least it was a safe and comfortable retirement alongside Dinah and several of his old friends.  He was still beloved as an icon of days gone by.  He wasn’t beating any records or winning any races anymore, but he no longer cared.  That stopped ages ago.  All that number chasing just meant nothing compared to being around those he truly loved.  Numbers would be beaten, replaced, forgotten, relegated to footnotes… but a true love, platonic or romantic, was never truly interchangeable.  

Electra never moved beyond his obsession with performance though.  Being faster and stronger than the GG1, making the best time he could, keeping up with if not surpassing more modern engines.  Always having to be on top, or at least outstanding for his size or age.  He always felt that knife against his back knowing the government wanted him gone, whether that fear was legitimate or not.  He just kept going and going, seemingly aware he’d go down like John Henry eventually.  Watching that shell be rolled into place, Greaseball solemnly nodded, that prophecy fulfilled.  

His speed records were broken.  Modern engines did times he could never do and pull things he could never pull.  If anything he was somehow known for his reliability in his sunset years until he really started to decline.  The common populace didn’t cheer because they recognized him from movies or media, like Greaseball.  He wasn’t that romantic ideal of a train, cruising across the open landscape with comfortable facilities.  He was a flash in the pan 40 years ago before being turned into an overworked busybody doing thankless commuter and freight trains half the time.  He tried to glamorize it but nobody cared.  

When he was younger, he would have felt smug victory.  You live for numbers, you die a statistic.  But it was just pathetic seeing him go out the way he did.  Struggling on too long and not even surviving his final trip.  He never even liked Electra but even he wanted better for him.