Why wouldn't they work outside? It's
not like they're magically gonna come off the rails once they leave
the dome.
All of your trains are outfitted with fail-safe
emergency brakes. On power loss, you have about 15 seconds before they
are applied and the train comes to an abrupt, unscheduled halt.
You can't even tow these things without power.
I thought you said the tracks were in decent
shape? Why would the contacts? sliders?
come off the power rail for that long?
A) I didn't, I said they are in
surprisingly decent shape after being exposed to the elements
for a century without any maintenance. B) That power rail isn't
gonna be of any use because it doesn't deliver any power.
What do you mean? Why not?
Where does the rail get its power from?
The power grid.
Not quite, but close enough. What do we not
have outside?
Of course there is a power grid outside.
It's what powered the old world just as ours powers the city.
There used to be one, that much is correct,
but it hasn't been used or maintained in a century. Even if you did
somehow manage to get part of it working, I still wouldn't trust it.
And where would you wanna get the electricity to run it from?
From a substation. We fix up one of those and
use it to power the grid.
Great, now you have a local grid attached to
the high voltage grid. And what do you wanna power that with?
What? The substations make the power.
It's where all the power in the city comes from: Two substations
– one in the wall next to this airlock and the other one is by
the other airlock.
There is a third one deep below Central
Square. These are indeed where the electricity in the city comes from
but they don't make it. They get it from a power plant outside,
a bit northeast of here.
The dome powered by the outside world?
People be believing strange things these days...
I don't have to believe. I was there when
the city was built and, more recently, I helped replace a failing
generator at said power plant. You might have noticed the power
outage.
Uhuh, sure buddy. Since you've been doing
nothing but spewing nonsense all this time, I'm just gonna have one
of our guys drive a train up there and we'll see what happens.
I'll get some popcorn; watching this is
gonna be fun. Wouldn't be the first time a train got stuck in these
tunnels...
Copyright © 2023 Jan Danielzick (aka. BodgeMaster) – All rights reserved.