Sodor's fight for survival.

The spark before the blaze

July 4th.
My name is Richard kindly. I drive the number 5 on the Northwestern railway who is known as James. My sister got me this notebook recently and I decided to use it to document events on the railway.

Recently the iron works has been testing out a new way of powering their furnaces. They've been importing cheap oil instead of using the more expensive coal they've used before. We took a train down there earlier and personal I'm split on the new arrangement. The stuffs profitable for the railway but the smoke coming from the furnaces at the smelters have turned a dark black. James doesn't like the trips to the smelters and neither do I, It's hot as hell being summer and the smoke doesn't make it any better.

We're waiting to leave the station with a goods train now so I'll write again if something interesting happens or if I get bored.

July 7th.
Just as I expected people aren't happy with the smoke coming from the Ironworks, they say it's already affected tourism and they aren't happy. He Sodor council is planning a meeting with the Ironworks managers about this. Recently we've had bad batch coal and it makes the engines spew black smoke. The fat controller has trialled smoke deflectors on both Henry and Gordon to improve visibility for the time being and I hope he gets some for James.

Murdoch took a train to the scrap yard earlier and was supposed to help with mainline work afterwords, but the station master said that a old crane fell onto the tracks and he's stuck. James and Henry have been splitting his work. James has been complaining to no end and I think it's starting to get on Henry's nerves. It's getting on my nerves too.

Other than that not much has happened so far. I'll write if anything Interesting happens.