sodorsteam

[sodorsteam]

Scott: I'm going to bed early to go to work early tomorrow.

The neighbors in short:

With @sodorsteam @shaymazing25 @unpopularvivian @ulcus88

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He peeked.

It did, in fact, ruin the surprise. And his trust in strangers. And his sleep for the rest of his life.

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Happy Rail-pril the 1st!

Gunzels, Gricers, Railfans, Foamers, Anoraks, Ferroequinologists, lend me your ears! For I come not to praise the past month, but to bury it and declare the month of Rail-pril!

I don’t have any prompts for Rail-pril, other than celebrating railbased transport, real or fictional.

Have fun!

Here’s a blast from the past!

I reckon it fits Harry’s retro tendencies, don’t you?

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He peeked.

It did, in fact, ruin the surprise. And his trust in strangers. And his sleep for the rest of his life.

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ITS ME ITS ME!!!!

reject negativity embrace community

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Been seeing a lot of garbage accusations going around lately, and I gotta say man…

fucking stop that shit. This is a fandom around an 80 year old kids book about trains. shut up.

This is the -SECOND- time I’ve been called a bunch of untrue bullshit and just like before, it’s purely tangential because someone is myad about art they don’t like, and they don’t know how to separate their own bitching from actual reality.

Get over it. learn to block and move on.

Just because you have no sense of scope or context doesn’t mean anyone else has to put up with your nonsense. Grow up.

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I was recently in Canada at the Toronto railway museum!

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HELL YEAH OUR BOY JOINS A BAND!!!

Trains On Filum (“Next Train Out”-Ablaze feat. H220, C10, J559 and L1150)

I don’t know about you but I like this song. It tickles the parts of my heart that appreciates this kind of pub rock.

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Yoooo this is glorious!! Love these beautiful bebs!

Devil Trains playing with fire…

@daisywithnomakeup’s Anchovy, VR D3 666 shows off her sigil-making chops with my version of VR H220 ‘Heavy Harry’

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Birthday? Birthday.

128 years old for Rook, substantially less so for me lol

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spent most of the day listening to Sonic music, & then i went 'lol what if our dudes were Sonic species'

So here is Heavy the Echidna, Manic the Fox, and Screwloose the badnik lol...Heavy and Manic belong to @engineer-gunzelpunk and im sure you can figure out who that weird purple badnik belongs to!

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Advertising for our premiere 20th Century Limited service. It contains a layout of the route and details about some of the cities it passes through, on top of information about the luxuries found on our trains!

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Man this one is SO GOOD dude, those faces, the expressions, absolutely fucking gold!

Complete!

Finally! A fully rendered RWS style digital painting of two railbastards.

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a lil' bit of Christmas Cheer! he needed a big cup of it, and now he's Reaping the Merry Rewards!

Merry Crimbles!

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“oh….yes lovely <3”

(Art by IlliminaughtyArt!)

The London Necropolis Railway, Westminster Bridge Road Entrance. 

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Ahahaha yes I agree with Pluto…trying weird food is one of life’s greatest joys! Maybe he’ll get over himself one day xD

Traintober Day 16: The Western (cw: animal death)

This story I wrote a while ago. It takes place in the Western region of Victoria, back in the 1940's. It features yet another one of my OCs, Victorian Railways A2 No 986 "Pluto", one of the long-lived A2 express passenger engines that graced the rails of Victoria from 1905 to 1963, to the very end of steam on the main line.

This is based on another true story of enginemen participating in a sheep muster from the books of Nick Anchen, a master of collecting warts-and-all stories from old enginemen that worked the railways. Some of the details are true to life as to what happened on this occasion, only thing that has changed is that the locomotives talk.

For those of a more sensitive disposition, I have put the story behind a cut.

Carnivore

Nearly every locomotive in the VR has performed some kind of country or agricultural work in their career. Heavy Harry pulled trains filled with meat, the Rs pulled the seasonal wheat trains,  the light-footed Js and the Ks pulled trains filled with livestock and fruit up and down the branchlines to and from Cudgewa in the North East, to take to Harry or Greyhound or the other swift-running X-classes waiting in Wodonga to take to Melbourne; it was the rare steam locomotive that stayed in suburban confines or didn’t pull any goods work. Australia was still a strongly rural place in the Steam Age, and Victoria was the agricultural breadbasket along with Tasmania. The fact that it was webbed in iron made distribution relatively easy and fast.

Quite often it involved sheep, pigs or cattle. Not the most pleasant of all jobs but it needed to be done. 

The year was 1943, the war in Europe and in the Pacific was at it’s height, and there was drought blighting the land.

One day, the cantankerous A2 express passenger locomotive No 986 Pluto and another A2, Roy, were being prepared to take a train up to Yelta, near Mildura in the state’s North West. Pluto was especially excited for the tales heard from the other locos promised wonders… but the landscape was anything but. Parched, yellow and unpromising.

Yelta was near the Little Desert, and was dry as dust. On the way to Yalta was the town of Merbin; which was home to a lot of very poor folk, the firemen in their generosity would kick off lumps of coal from their footplates on the way up or down so that the poor could cook and heat their homes with it. But the purpose of this trip to Yalta was to gather sheep from the flocks there and to take down to the opposite end of the state, Korumburra in Gippsland in the East.

Korumburra was sheep grazing country and the absolute opposite of Yelta ; wet, cold and lush, perfect for fattening sheep.

“What are you so happy about, you cranky old bastard? We’re travelling into Hell in a handbasket...”, groused Roy, who seemingly wanted to piss on Pluto’s parade. “You’ll see, idiot boy…”,  chuckled Pluto, who was normally grumpy and argumentative but today,  his gleefulness was unshakeable.

This was country so far away it required two locomotives to go the distance, and the then newly built young H220 Heavy Harry who was formally built for this purpose was being used to cart troops around; so the old-fashioned A2s still performed their work on their old lines like the Western Line to Serviceton and The Overland express.

The locomotives pulled up at Yelta and their fires were banked. Pluto relaxed and drank his fill of water, chuckling away at a seemingly hilarious scene.

“Whats so bloody funny?” snapped Roy. “Look at our drivers and firemen…”, snickered Pluto. The drivers and firemen had changed clothes and joined the sheep muster, loading the sheep onto trains. The drought had made them thin, pathetic things but that didn’t seem to deter the drivers and firemen helping the farmers to load the sheep into the vans as they could. 

Pluto enjoyed the sight of the humans running about and gave an occasional little laugh to himself. Pluto being so happy rather than angry was irritating and frightening to Roy, who always knew Pluto as the engine who was seemingly ‘born old”, grousing about everything and anything under the sun. After a while, the drivers and firemen returned … with a plump sheep.

Pluto couldn’t help but give an excited little hiss of steam, and it all got on Roy’s buffers something fierce. “Why are you so excited that we are in this dust hole watching our drivers and firemen chase sheep about?! Really bloody skinny sheep at that! And why are you so bloody happy they took a sheep! It’s going to shit in your cab on the way back! It’s definitely going to shit in my cab! Ew!’

Pluto’s joy was not diminished, “You watch, idiot boy…”. As they watched, Pluto’s driver and fireman slaughtered the sheep with a practiced care like they had done it a hundred times before, quickly and with no fuss. Roy quailed in fright at the sight. They carried the sheep and a trough into Pluto’s cab, and hung it off his tender near the coal chute. 

They cut the wool off the sheep, cleaned it, drained the blood into the trough, skinned it and took the entrails out. Pluto’s excitement became audible, his roiling boiler hissing and bubbling away.

“Tucker time, Pluto!” yelled his Driver, as he threw the entrails into his coal bed, the fire cooking the meat and then adding their charcoal-ed remains to the ash and clinker of the pan after a thorough burning.

Pluto hummed and simmered happily as the smell of cooking meat encompassed his entire being.

Roy was shocked and appalled.

“You got so excited to be a giant barbecue, you crazy old fool!” barked Roy.

“You stupid, silly little kid" grumbled Pluto. "Eating something you are not accustomed to normally is a pleasure!

 ‘Getting to eat human food sometimes really broadens the mind! 

‘Eat the liver, boy! It’ll put the mettle in your metal! Put the iron in your frames! Eh he he he he!”

“You like eating that stuff? After you saw it get slaughtered? You are really are crazy!” 

Pluto’s mouth twisted slighty and he just gave a brief wheesh, the locomotive equivalent of a shrug… and his voice turned cold and strained.

“Roy, I have been very, very exceedingly nice to you through this entire trip, it is literally killing me.’

“Not even my boy Harry gets as much of a banter-free run as you have. Instead of letting me have my joy, which is a rare and delectable treat thank you very much… you complain like a fishwife…”

“You carry on like that, the only thing you’ll be eating is coal and human waste…”

“Human waste?”, squeaked Roy.

Pluto laughed, “Well, they don’t install dunnies in us, do they?’

Roy’s grey face blanched in terror. “They would really put their filth in our fireboxes?!”

He retched at the thought, but Pluto just casually rolled his eyes and wheeshed briefly once more.

“Who knows? Since they know we are alive, they don’t do that, at least its never happened to me, they’ve done it in a bucket and tipped it out the side… but since you’ve been shitting on my joy since we left Melbourne, you foolish boy… it would only be just if it happened your crew’s ‘honey bucket’ got lost…”

Roy said not a word on the way back to Melbourne, the smell of sheep was making him ill. Nothing involving poo in the firebox happened… but the idea was terrible to him.

And Pluto enjoyed the smell of cooked meat in and around him in peace, all the way to Gippsland. He even had a tiny bit of the cut of the mutton the Driver and Fireman had hanging near his coal chute; they cut off a bit, cooked and ate it for lunch and put a little bit for him.

And it was delicious.

***

[sodorsteam]

Black cats have the lowest adoption rate of all domestic felines, at only 10%.

Remember! Adopt, don't shop, and always give a lucky black cat a little love, especially during Halloween!