OPP Side Stories
Analyzing the Visual Dictionary in Canterlot
Admiral Biscuit

Professor Rowan resisted the urge to rest his hooves on the balcony railing as he looked down into the foyer at the students milling about. Somewhere down there would be their department’s guest, a stallion he'd never met before in his life.

Not that that was a new thing. Each semester, he saw new faces in his classroom . . . but they were mostly bright-faced young unicorns, eager to have the wisdom of the ages imparted upon them. Was it any wonder that he was apprehensive at the thought of meeting somepony who existed far outside the hallowed halls of academia?

Rowan knew him the moment he walked through the doors. The stallion was wearing nothing but a sweat-stained cap on his head, and an unfashionable yellow bandanna around his neck. Why didn’t we have him come in a back entrance, out of sight of the students?

The stallion knew he was out of place. His eyes were wide as he glanced around the spotless lobby. As a duo of mares changed course to avoid him, he glanced down at his soot-stained fetlocks and absently rubbed a hoof on his kerchief. Professor Rowan died a little inside—such behavior was unforgivably gauche. No wonder the students were avoiding him.

I have no choice, he reminded himself. As the most junior professor in the Mechanical Science department, the unpleasant chore of meeting with an actual workingpony had fallen upon him.

Professional pride, he reminded himself as he straightened his bowtie. Rumors of what had befallen Bright Star and some of her department heads ran rampant through the university, and they had been warned to be certain that the same fate did not befall them. They would do what they had to in order to get results, distasteful though it might be.

Rowan moved from his position and began carefully descending the curved stairway to the ground floor. His guest had stopped in the center of the room, and was staring with wide-eyed wonder at the fountain in the center of the lobby. Don't even, he thought, but it was to no avail; the earth pony reached under his yellow bandanna and flicked a brass coin into the water. Conversations in the lobby temporally lulled, before returning full-force.

If he'd noticed that he was suddenly the center of unwanted attention, the stallion gave no sign. He moved to study the small plaque under a statue of Starswirl as Professor Rowan finally reached the polished marble of the lobby floor. Rowan flinched as he caught the stallion’s scent—smoke and grease and sweat.

“Mister Steamer?” The stallion glanced at him. “Will you follow me, please?”

Once again, the conversation in the lobby quieted, only to return with a vengeance a moment later. Rowan pretended not to notice, but he could hardly help his ears flicking about as the students began their gossip again. Dozens of pairs of eyes watched as he crossed the final gulf between himself and his visitor.

The stallion held up a foreleg, and Rowan gritted his teeth and gave him a brief bump back, trying not to think of what foulness might be on the stallion's hoof.

“Fancy building you've got here,” the stallion said. “Not used to being someplace this fancy.”

“The University was commissioned by Princess Celestia Herself,” Rowan said mechanically. “It was the second public building to break ground in Canterlot, after the Palace compound.” He led the stallion along the wide corridors, keeping up a brisk pace. One ear was cocked back, monitoring his guest's progress, while the other monitored the voices around him. He couldn't help but worry that he might run into one of his students—or worse, Professor Goldenrod, who he was working up the courage to ask out on a date.

Several flights of stairs and corridors later, they finally arrived in the nascent Mechanical Science wing. Even though it was looked down upon by most of the faculty, he was proud to offer a scientific basis for machinery here in Canterlot, unlike the uneducated experimenters in Detrot who simply threw together machines which as often as not tore themselves apart. Here, everything was planned out on paper beforehoof.

“Right this way, please,” Rowan said, opening a door with his magic. “Wipe your hooves on the mat, if you would.”

Steamer let out an annoyed snort, and pawed at the mat hard enough to wrinkle it, before crossing the threshold into the room. His eyes were immediately drawn to a gleaming brass steam engine, bigger than a pony, that took up an entire wall. The chimney passed along the ceiling and out a window. Without Rowan's leave, he walked over to it and ran a hoof lovingly along the shining boiler.

“We fire it for the students,” Rowan explained. “So that they can get an idea of how to operate one. They're the up and coming thing, you know. Can do the work of several ponies. One day, we might be able to make them small enough to power a single cart.”

“Hmf.” Steamer frowned. “Who'd want that? A cart's easy enough to pull. Imagine how much water and fuel you'd have to carry if you wanted it to go any distance. The future of the steam engine is in bigger trains and boats.”

“That's why we called you here.” A middle-aged stallion with half-rimmed spectacles stepped forward. “I'm Professor Neighsmyth, head of the Mechanical Science department. You’ve met Professor Rowan. These are my colleagues, Professors Flankine and Hackworth, and visiting professor Sir Neigel Gearsley. We . . . well, we're in a bit of a quandary.” He lowered his head. “In fact, we've got something we can't make head nor tail of, and Princess Celestia wants to know just what we're looking at.” He motioned over to a table in the center of the room.

Steamer trotted eagerly over to the table, and the other professors moved slightly back. He didn't notice; he picked up a heavy iron apparatus and gave it a quick glance. “It's a governor. Is this some kind of joke?”

“Not that.” Neighsmyth had the courtesy to blush slightly. “Drawings. I know what a governor is.” He plucked it out of Steamer's grasp and set it gently on a workbench behind them. “Over here—these drawings. Let me spread them out for you. They're copies from a book that came from a foreign land.”

Steamer looked at the drawings intently, moving back and forth along the table as he studied one and then another. Stopping at one in particular, he leaned down until his muzzle was nearly touching the paper. Rowan took a step forward to move him back from the precious documents, but Neighsmyth held up a leg to stop him.

“One of the things I learned in Detrot,” he whispered, “is that many of the tinkers have a very good eye for how something might work, or how it might be put together.”

“Nopony knows how these are put together,” Rowan insisted. “I don't know why we're wasting our time with—“

“Okay.” Steamer took a step back from the table. “Is this some kind of joke? Who made these drawings? Griffons? Cows?”

“No, it's—“

“Minotaurs,” Professor Flankine interrupted. “Well, a cousin to the minotaur. They live in a far-off land, we've been told.”

Steamer waited for a better explanation, but none was forthcoming. “You know, it would be very helpful to give me a better idea of what I might be looking at in order to tell you what I'm seeing.” He pointed to a drawing. “What's their track gauge, for one? Equestrian standard? Broad? Narrow?”

“I don't know if we can tell you,” Rowan said.

“Well I don't know if I can tell you what I see, then.”

“What Professor Rowan means to say,” Neighsmyth said, “is that this is a new situation, and we're not sure how much the Princesses want to be public. I don't have terribly much more information than what you see before you. We do know that the creatures who drew these are about the size of an adult male minotaur.”

“Are you assuming that they're meant to be used by the same creatures?”

“That's a reasonable assumption, yes.”

“Thank you.” He took of his cap, brushed his mane back, and tucked his cap back on. “Let's begin with the passenger coach. I’ve never seen one—how tall would you say a minotaur is?”

“About twice as tall and twice as wide as a pony,” Rowan said. “They have broad shoulders.”

“So that gives us a good size reference,” Steamer said. “Obviously, this is a passenger coach. It has individual seats instead of benches, so that gives us a really good idea of just how big it is. Using your estimate, the coach would be as wide as ten ponies standing shoulder-to-shoulder, or even a little bit wider, since minotaurs might not like crowding that tight. Aren’t they kind of solitary?”

“There are only four seats across,” Rowan countered. “Two on each side.”

“Got to count the aisle, too,” Neighsmyth reminded him.

“Exactly.” He stepped back from the table. “It looks to me like the wheels are tucked in quite far, so their track gauge might not be that much wider than ours. It looks quite unstable, to be honest. Such a coach would have trouble on curves—it might fall off the inside, or the outside if it were moving at any sort of speed. Superelevation would help it keep to the rails, but it still couldn’t make any kind of sharp turn—the overhang in the middle would be quite pronounced.

“What interests me more is this.” He slid a drawing towards himself. “This is clearly a steam locomotive, built to an unimaginable scale. Whoever came up with this is technologically far ahead of us.”

“Why?”

“Because it's huge. It would have to be, to pull cars that size. Just imagine if one were full to capacity with ponies—the passenger weight alone would be ten tons or more. Add the weight of the coach, and it must weigh thirty or forty tons when it's full. And nopony builds a train to haul just one coach . . . . if it had ten, that's four hundred tons that the locomotive has to pull. Plus its own weight, of course. I can't imagine how they can build a big enough fire to make enough steam . . . unless. . . .” He touched a hoof to the drawing. “Ingenious.”

“What do you see?” Neighsmyth looked at him hopefully.

“They made the firebox bigger by putting it behind the drive wheels. See, that's what those wheels in the back are for, to carry the weight of the firebox. They can extend it all the way out—here's the line between the firebox and the boiler. All the running gear's exposed; that's not very neat, but I suppose it would make maintaining it easier.

“And it's fast. Look how big the drivers are. Oh, I'd love to see the real thing. I bet you could stand on your hind hooves and barely touch the tops of the drivers.”

“Why does that make it fast?” Rowan asked curiously.

“Because the bigger the wheel, the further it goes on each stroke of the piston.” Steamer balanced himself on the table and began to move his leg back and forth. “Imagine my leg is a piston, pushing on the side rods. It can only go so fast before it breaks—there are mechanical limits to how quickly you can move a piston back and forth. You can get more distance traveled out of each of those strokes by making the wheel bigger, see? The downside is that it has less tractive effort when it first starts off, so it needs loads of extra power to get those wheels moving.

“Now, if we look at the tender, we can get an idea for how much appetite this locomotive has. It looks like they use coal, and it’s piled up as high as the top of the cab. Behind that would be its water supply, fed into the boiler from a pipe, no doubt. It’s carrying a lot of water; that’s why the trucks have six wheels each. Boilers may have a healthy appetite for fuel, but they go through water like a swarm of parasprites.” Steamer squinted at the drawing. “There’s some kind of ladder . . . probably so the firepony can get on top without climbing the coal. There would be water hatches on the back deck, of course. But what’s this next to the coupler?”

He leaned forward to get a closer look while the professors chattered behind him. “I think they've invented automatic brakes, too,” he declared. “I think that's what this little piece is for.”

“That could be a safety connection,” Professor Hackworth suggested.

“No.” He shook his head. “Look at their coupler design. It's like two interlocking hooks, and it's big. Whatever this little piece is, it's not to assure the couplers stay together. It's not big enough. You'd need a massive chain for that—a normal rope wouldn't do it. You could make a wire rope strong enough, I suppose, but it would have to have an eye in the end, unless you planned to never unhook the cars. See, all the other drawings of railcars have them, too. I bet when they're all connected, the brakepony can pull a lever in the locomotive and it applies the brakes on all the cars. The locomotive itself wouldn't be able to stop that many cars at once.”

“Why not? Our locomotives can.”

“Not on hills, they can't. Haven't you ever seen a train slide through the station? Why do you think we put brake vans on the end of some trains?” He squinted at the drawings of the cars. “I wish that there was a detailed look at their brake system. We always seem to have problems with slack in the ropes. I’ve heard Westinghorse is experimenting with a hydraulic system, but they can’t build enough water pressure in the pipes to get good braking action, and if the system leaks, you lose all your brakes. But if the minotaurs built something this big, they've got that problem licked.”

Gearsley nodded his head. “Is there enough information here, do you think, for your shop to build one?”

“A locomotive like this? No. Give us another decade or two, and then maybe. Maybe we'd understand the principles enough to build one this size.”

Rowan stepped forward. “What if we can get actual blueprints?”

Steamer shook his head. “No ironworks would be big enough to lay the frame. I doubt wheels that size could be cast . . . and it wouldn't be of any use, even if we did build it.”

“I don't understand why not.”

“It's too big and too heavy. It would collapse the first trestle it ventured across, if the thrust from the drivers didn't tear the rails out from underneath as soon as the engineer opened the throttle. Unless the middle drivers were blind, it would never make it around a curve—and it might not, even then.”

“Oh.” Rowan looked at the drawings sadly.

“What about this, then?” Neighsmyth picked up another drawing and held it in front of Steamer. “What do you make of this?”

“They understand the principles of streamlining . . . but it has no drive wheels. Hmm.” Eager faces crowded around him, awaiting his next pronouncement. “It could be gear-driven, I suppose. I don't see any smokestack, and the roof's pretty clean, except for this array on the top. It could be a magic receiver? No, that doesn't make any sense. It would take dozens of unicorns to power this over any real distance. Even some strong come to life spells wouldn't take it all that far—believe me, we've tried. Unless that wire isn't attached to the locomotive, but is strung overhead . . . then it might pick up enough field energy to move the thing. They'd have to have a complex crystal array inside, though. Or it could just be a way to communicate with the telegraph system while in motion. Yes, that makes more sense. They put these on the front to streamline the train, and a locomotive pushes from the rear. That’s why it doesn’t have a coupler at the front. A pilot up here can relay train orders back to the engineer.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Smoke. It’s bad enough on our locomotives, especially if you’ve got a green firepony who can’t build the fire right, or an engineer who works it wrong. Imagine how much smoke this would make. Every light-coated pony on the train would be bitterly complaining about the soot. But, if the locomotive is in the back, the smoke runs behind the train, and nopony aboard can see it or smell it.”

“I meant talk to the telegraph. Why would you need to do that?”

“So you don't have to stop at every station and pick up train orders. Look at the size of the tender on that locomotive. They mean for it to carry a lot of fuel and water, so it won't have to stop as often. That’s the only reason why you’d want to carry that much weight in water—but you lose that advantage if you still have to stop at every station to pick up orders. Our locomotives don't carry enough water to skip a station and still make it to the next without stopping; this one could.”

Rowan shook his head. “I still don't understand. Why does it need orders? It's on a track; it can't go where it's not supposed to.”

“Look, son, most of Equestria is single-tracked. That means that only one train at a time can be on a particular section. But they need to go in both directions, right? So they have to meet somewhere where there’s a siding and pass each other.

“When things go right, it's all governed by the timetable. Let's say that the train to Baltimare leaves Canterlot and stops at the base of the mountains so the train from Baltimare can pass it and head up the mountain. Well, now suppose the Baltimare train is running late? The Canterlot train will waste a lot of time waiting for it to arrive. So, maybe the dispatcher tells them to go on to the next station and wait there. Now the orders have been modified, and the Baltimare train has lost its track rights. If they don't know that—if, for whatever reason, they run by their station without stopping—they're going to run head-on into the Canterlot train.

“Or let's say that a train breaks down between two stations. When it's late, all we can do is have somepony walk the rails until she finds it—or fly, if there’s a pegasus at the station—and all the other trains that are supposed to be traveling down that line are stuck until it's located, and then we have to find out if it's an equipment failure, a derailment, a damaged section of track . . . it takes hours and hours.

“This way, all the trains can communicate with each other at once, and with all the stations, too. It's much safer. They'd have to have a telegraph operator in each train, of course. He could pass the orders along to the engineer. We've been experimenting with a similar system ourselves. It's still got a ways to go; we really need a way to isolate the public telegraph system from the railroad system, and extra train-only wires might just be the way to do it.”

“That's interesting.” Neighsmyth looked at the drawing thoughtfully. “Professor Sparks, would you have your students do a feasibility study of the type of communication system Steamer is describing? Once you've come up with some workable ideas, I'm sure the railroad would be interested in experimenting with them.”

“So, here’s how they must run their trains,” Professor Flankine observed. “The have this streamlined pilot coach in front. Behind that, a number of passenger coaches, and then the locomotive bringing up the rear. How do you suppose they would crew such an arrangement? It seems less efficient—we can make do with an engineer and a firepony. They could have no less than three.”

“Four, I would say.” Steamer furrowed his brow. “You’d have a pilot in the lead coach, watching the tracks and relaying orders to the engineer. Then the telegraph operator—I don’t think you could expect the pilot to also translate telegraph code. He could also serve as a head-end brakepony. On the hind end of the train, you’d have the engineer who’s faithfully carrying out the pilot’s orders, and the firepony.”

“But how could an engineer properly run the train if he couldn’t even see where he was going? He’d bang the coaches together too hard, and everypony would complain.” Rowan looked at Steamer earnestly. “I was on an overnight train from Manehattan that banged so hard when it left the station that my wineglass nearly fell over.”

“That was slack action,” Steamer told him. “Because all the coaches run into the locomotive when it stops, and then are pulled apart one after another when the train starts again. With the locomotive on the back, that wouldn't be a problem. It has nothing to do with the engineer being able to see where he’s going.”

“It’s my understanding that a train is slow to respond,” Professor Flankine said, “because it weighs so much. A good engineer looks at the rails ahead of him, and can adjust his speed in advance. How could he do that properly if he can’t see what lies ahead?”

“Steamships use a speaking tube or a bell to communicate between the pilothouse and the engine room,” Steamer reminded him. “Surely the same system could work on a locomotive. It might take a bit of getting used to, but it could be done.”

Neighsmyth nodded. “It might be a better system,” he admitted. “Perhaps, Professor Flankine, you would be so kind as to have your students delve into the operating advantages of pushing rather than pulling. It could be that we’re so used to pulling carts that we have made a logical mistake in applying pony principles to a machine.” He turned back to the desk and selected two new sheets of paper. “Now, Steamer, your trains also have freight cars, don’t they?”

He nodded. “Of course. Moving freight by rail is the most efficient system there is—why, whole industries have sprung up around that concept. Did you know it used to take almost a month to get a wagon of wheat from Neighbraska to Manehattan? We can do it in a week!”

“We've guessed that these must be different types of freight car,” Rowan said, pointing to another page. “Do you agree?”

Steamer’s eyes widened as he looked down at the page. “So many different types. Using the wheels as scale, they must be as big as the passenger cars, and carry as much weight. Can you imagine how much you could haul in one? Each would take the place of hundreds of wagons. Each railroad must have hundreds of craftsponies just building railcars, and a huge rail network.”

“What are they all for?”

“I . . . don’t know.” Steamer gave them an apologetic shrug. “We have boxcars, of course. Like that one there. Very versatile; you can put practically anything in it and keep it safe from the weather. It’s like a barn on wheels.

“The next one looks like some kind of water tank They’re stronger if they’re round, you know. Maybe they need to carry water places? I can’t think of any other liquids anypony would want to move in large enough quantities to carry it loose in a car that size.

“This one . . . it doesn’t have any doors. I don’t know what they’d use it for. And this one has open sides— it’s just a bunch of slats in a box form. Maybe they’ve built enough that they can dry corn in it? Like a portable corn crib? But that doesn’t make any sense.

“These two . . . they have openings at the bottom, see? And you can tell that this one has slanted ends. So they’re filled with something loose, like coal, that you can load in the top and dump out the bottom when you’ve reached your destination. We use them to bring in coal for the trains—some of our yards have trestles where the car can unload beneath it, otherwise it has to be unloaded by hoof.”

Neighsmyth pointed to the second page. “And these?”

“Well, that’s a flat car. Very useful; probably the most common type of car we have. See, each of these has different things on it. This one has big boxes, this one has some kind of box with wheels; there’s one with bulkheads for loads like rail that you can’t have shift back and forth as the train moves, and this one has half-sides . . . like a gambo wagon.

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully at a sixteen-wheeled flat car with a depressed center section. “This one’s a bit of a puzzler. I guess you could carry a taller load with it, but I’m at a loss at how it would be built. I don’t see how the structure could hold together— it would be very hard to bend wood that way and have it hold its strength. Especially if the cargo is so heavy that it needs sixteen wheels.”

“Thank you, Steamer. You've been very helpful.” Neighsmyth began to motion him out the door. “We'll send somepony for you if we need more help, but right now we need to begin writing our findings for the Princess.”

“I want to see it for myself,” Steamer muttered. “Or a picture—whoever got these . . . ask the Princess if she can arrange to have a photograph taken of one of these pieces of equipment, maybe with a pony standing next to it for scale. I just want to get some idea of how big they really are. I want to see a movie of one of them operating . . . because that is the future. One day we'll be able to build trains like that. Maybe not in my lifetime, but one day. . . .”

Author's Notes:

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