Chapter 19 August 406 AD Flat Top Mountain-A Whistle Heard Around the World

            At the base of Flat Top mountain, where a twenty thousand square foot factory, which was officially designated as a warehouse for experimental steam weapons, Busara watched nervously as his workers carefully maneuvered the steam shovel onto the back of a rail car, connected to the first steam locomotive built by the factory, which was finished two weeks earlier than the steam shovel.

The steam shovel was technically self-driven on rails, but it only moved at a half a mile an hour. Most of its energy went into moving its shovel and turning the base the shovel was built on. As such the steam shovel was being put on a specially made flat metal rail car, that had rails on top. It was designed specifically so that the steam shovel could be driven on top of it and pulled to its digging site as quickly as possible by the steam locomotive. The sketchiest part of the operation was the ramps connecting the rail line to the rails on the rail car. If they gave out during the operation a year’s worth of work would be gone, albeit they had another steam shovel in production scheduled to be finished in a month.

            Basara didn’t want any accidents to happen. He considered it a miracle that the seventy families hadn’t investigated this warehouse, due to the smokestacks. Although he had to admit that miracle was probably helped by the reality that every day he had the Illuminati Guard fire random steam weapons in every direction from the wall. That said, the seventy families had been very focused on Jinka, so perhaps they didn’t think that the Illuminati would betray them. They didn’t realize how much the Illuminati resented the seventy families. Becoming a member of the illuminati and having access to the images of technology that King Paul left behind should have meant incredible wealth and power for every Illuminati member, and in fact many of the seventy families were started by Illuminati members, but due to their restrictions the Illuminati were stuck at middle class, glimpsing greatness but never being allowed to make it.

            With that in mind he watched as the large steam winch built into the front of the rail car strained to help the steam shovel up the ramps, particularly when the steam shovel was geared to only go half a mile an hour. One of the mechanicists had to spend half an hour regearing the winch so that it pulled at half a mile as well. Once he was finished the process went much smoother. Once the steam shovel was safely on the rails on the rail car, and its brakes were on, and its wheels were chocked, Basara sighed in relief.

            He turned to the men guarding the door and told them, “Open the door.”

            They nodded and began opening the door. Standing outside the door were Illuminati and Jinka reporters and cameramen. As soon as the door was open one of the reporters shouted, "Why did you bring us all the way here first thing in the morning?”

            Busara yelled back, “Get off the track and you will see.”

            “Why? I don’t see any horses.”

            “We don’t need horses to pull carts on tracks anymore.”

            “What do you mean we don’t need horses anymore? Are you going to pull the carts by hand?”

            Busara frowned, but before he could say anything one of the Illuminati reporters said, “That’s the head of the Illuminati. If he says they don’t need horses to pull carts anymore then they have a new invention to pull carts.”

            “What magic?”

            Before anyone else could answer Busara said, “Steam.” Then he turned to the locomotive and said, “Go, and if the reporter is too stupid to move run him over.”

            The locomotive operator nodded, pushed a lever, and the train started moving forward. The reporters were stunned seeing something so big move. A couple of them scrambled to the side looking for the elephants needed to pull it, but they didn’t see anything. Most just stood and watched wondering how such a large piece of iron was moving. The operator pulled on another lever and the loudest noise, a whistle, any of them ever heard knocked them out of their daze, and the reporters and camera men got off the tracks while covering their ears.

            As the locomotive moved out of the factory the reporters and cameramen couldn’t help but notice that the locomotive was pulling four massive “carts”. The first one it pulled was filled with coal, for the two machines, the next one was filled with spare parts, the third was empty, and the last “cart” it pulled held the steam shovel.

            One of the reporters spoke with awe, “It would take a team of thirty oxen to pull one of those carts, much less all of them.” Busara wasn’t sure if the reporter was correct, or if he was exaggerating to make the story more exciting.

            As the locomotive moved one of the reporters asked, “Where is it going?”

            Busara said, “To a nearby coal field.”

            “Why? There isn’t any money in mining in Paulsland.”

            Paulsland didn’t do much mining because the laws made it hard to future proof your work. Paulsland law dictated that the land belonged to Paulsland until someone found a use for it. Once they did they paid a small fee to register the land for their use, and they were given just two years to put the land to work. This meant that if you found a good spot to mine in Paulsland you couldn’t just claim all the minable land as your own, at least not for more than two years, so if there was useful land to mine, a wave of young men, or immigrants mined the easiest part of the land, made a bit of cash and then moved onto something more profitable. Compare this to any other country in the world where one landowner owned massive tracts of land and often bought slaves to do his mining for him, and you discover why its often cheaper in Paulsland to buy mined products from other nations than to develop their own mines.  

            After a moments thought Busara said, “We have tests to run. Do you want to follow and watch?”

            The various reports nodded and some said, “Yes.” Others said, “Of course.”

            And so Busara, several Illuminati members, the reporters, cameramen and guards began walking along the locomotive as it moved to its destination. The locomotive sped up to five miles an hour until it reached the main rail line used by the public, then it lowered its speed down to two miles an hour. Paulsland had the largest network of rails in the world, albeit with large swaths of it damaged from the wars, as King Paul instructed the Illuminati to make them three centuries ago, and with the Illuminati of every generation since, expecting steam locomotives to be made public in their lifetime they were very insistent on making sure the rails were up to the weight and stress of what they were designing. Up to this point ox and horse pulled carts had dominated the rails, and so the rails were loved by the public for their ability to pull much larger loads than on road carts, albeit the carts they used to pull those larger loads were far more expensive. In order to help with traffic all public rail lines in Paulsland had pairs of rails with plenty of places to switch lines when necessary.

            In contrast the other nations in Paulsland’s sphere of influence had seen the practicality of rails and built them only in places where rails were more practical than canals. This meant that even if this locomotive was sold to Rome, Kush, Parthian, or any other nation they would still need decades to build a railroad network across their nations. To be fair though, Paulsland may have an issue with their public rails as the public had long used them, but Busara considered that a problem for the future.

            As the locomotive moved it blew its whistle. The Illuminati guard were expecting the loud whistle, although they didn’t expect the whistle to be so loud. This was fortunate because one in five people thought the horn was signaling some sort of attack. If it wasn’t for the Illuminati guard they would have rang gongs and sent messages up the communication towers about it. With that said, a lot of people had issues with their animals, whether it was horse, ox, dog, cat, or even elephant, none of the animals liked the extremely high sound of the locomotive whistle and so as the locomotive moved and blew its whistle mini stampedes were created nearby.

            That said the majority of people who heard the whistle decided to investigate, and when they saw the locomotive they were shocked at the “iron horse”. They couldn’t believe that tons of iron could not only move by itself, but move gigantic carts like they were nothing. As the iron horse moved at the speed of a walking ox more and more people showed up to walk alongside it and see this never-imagined marvel.

            At its slow speed it took three fourths of the day to move to the closest coal field. Although the iron horse could go much faster, it was slowed significantly by all the oxen that were using the public rail. The coal field it reached was owned by a corporation created by Jinka. Jinka hired two hundred miners to mine nearly a thousand individual sections of the coal field, under the name “Corporate Coal”. Their contract stipulated that every day they work they were paid twice as much as they would be given if they mined coal by hand, with the caveat that Jinka kept all the profits from the mine, and the miners mined enough to keep their sections of the mine legally used, so that Corporate Coal could continually claim the land. The miners gladly agreed, assuming some corporate land shenanigans were afoot. They were surprised when Jinka’s representative offered double pay if they built a private rail line down the middle of the land, but they didn’t scoff at the extra money.

When the iron horse arrived it let the steam shovel off, and the steam shovel made its way into the Corporate Coal’s coal fields. The people were confused when the iron horse unhooked the rail car with rails before following the steam shovel, with its empty car between the steam shovel and the rest of the train. That said they were super impressed that the iron horse could move as fast as a horse going forward and backward.

            When the steam shovel reached the coal fields it immediately got to work, and the people that watched thought they were watching magic come to life. The steam shovel was built on a railroad cart, which had a very large ring in the middle, and the steam shovel box was on top of that ring. The steam shovel box had the steam engine, operator box, a place for the engineer to feed coal into the furnace, a gigantic shovel with half a cubic yard of space, and all the gears needed to make it run.

When the box turned sideways, but the car remained in place many of the people thought it would tip over, but the operators ignored them and dropped the shovel in the dirt, and used the machine to lift a half a cubic yard of it out of the ground, exposing coal. The operator then turned the box around and dropped the worthless dirt on the ground. On the next pass it filled its bucket with as much coal as an average minor could dig up in half an hour, turned to the empty rail car, and emptied eight hundred pounds of coal into it, before turning back to the coal field and digging more. In just two minutes it dug up as much coal as one man could dig in a day. In fifteen minutes it filled up the empty car. Corporate Coal’s process wasn’t efficient yet but clearly their new pieces of equipment worked, and in days to come Corporate Coal would be selling coal so cheap in the surrounding area every coal miner had to find other work.

As for the papers they printed pictures and stories about he magic of steam power.

The seventy families were furious and scared.