The Fire Queen

Chapter 64

As excited as I was about Bandor deciding to start trading with us it was nothing compared with the excitement I felt when word came from Galand that the steam locomotive was ready for its first test. I flew to Galand with Myra as soon as I received the message. In order to test the steam locomotive the dwarves had built a test track on the Rhume salt flats. The track went roughly halfway to the Bronden mountains that separated the kingdom from the Northlands, long enough for us to test the effectiveness of the locomotive.

"It took longer for us to get it ready for a test because we had to rebuild the boiler, the first one exploded because the heat from the fire turtle was too great," Brumli explained to me as he was giving me a tour of the locomotive.

"And it's safe now?"

"Yes, we managed to work out how much fire the turtle needs to emit for us to safely heat the boiler to the required temperature."

"So everything's ready then?"

"Yes, everything's ready."

The steam locomotive that we were testing was a rudimentary model that they had built solely for the purpose of proving that the concept worked. It was basically just a wooden box with four wheels. the boiler inside powered the front wheels which were connected to the rear wheels by two longitudinal pieces of metal. Brumli assured me that if this one worked the next one they built would be much better equipped. Brumli and I were going to make this first test run ourselves with Myra following us from the sky. I stood back and left Brumli to take care of what needed to be done to get the vehicle moving. He tapped on the boiler with a stick to signal to the turtle to start emitting flames from its shell. The boiler started to heat up, and when it started whistling from a small opening at the top Brumli released the brake and removed the stopper from one of the two release pipes on top of the boiler and when he did we started moving forward. We started losing speed as we moved along, which Brumli addressed by tapping on the boiler again to tell the turtle to increase the temperature, which upped our speed.

"You have to let the steam build up pressure before you start it, once it's been released the pressure decreases and you need more temperature to keep the steam going strong," Brumli explained.

I was so astounded that Brumli and the others had actually gotten this thing to work that I was unable to speak. Brumli kept explaining things to me as we moved along and I kept only nodding my head in response. My head was spinning too fast with the myriad of possibilities that this invention was going to create for us for me to pay close attention to everything that Brumli was doing. Only when we were reaching the end of the track and we needed to slow down did I start paying close attention again to what he was doing. He tapped on the boiler again, this time to tell the turtle to stop emitting flames, and when we had slowed down sufficiently he applied the brake, bringing us to a gradual halt.

"Now how do we get back?" I asked him.

Brumli didn't answer me, he merely gave me a cheeky smile and got to work. He placed the stopper back into the release pipe that he had removed it from earlier and tapped on the boiler for the turtle to start heating it up again. The boiler started whistling, and this time Brumli disengaged the brake and removed the stopper from the other release pipe, which caused us to start moving in the direction from which we came. Obviously, the pipe which released the steam dictated the direction in which the axle spun. The engineering behind it was so simple that I couldn't believe I hadn't figured it out sooner. We returned to the Galand to the cheers of the crowd that awaited us, all of whom had worked incredibly hard to make this moment a reality. This was their moment of victory more than it was mine, and no one was more deserving of the plaudits than Brumli.

"Brumli, I don't know what to say, what you have achieved with this is nothing short of astounding."

"Don't get too excited yet, this is just the beginning, now comes the hard part, making one that can actually pull a heavy load."

"I have no doubt that you will be able to make it, which is why I am going to press ahead with plans to get the kingdom ready for when we start rolling them out."

Aseron was comprised of seven states. My plan was to have lines running from Glendale to the capital city of each state. When I returned to the palace I began taking steps to make sure that we were going to have everything we needed to start deploying the steam locomotives. Ferland convened the Governing Council and I told them all about the steam locomotive and the new mine that we needed to break ground on in the east. I explained to them that we needed to build a large terminal in Glendale and terminals in the capital cities of all the states, that metalworkers and woodworkers across the kingdom needed to start devoting a significant amount of their time to manufacturing the rails and sleepers that we needed for laying the tracks, and that the landscape needed to be surveyed to ascertain the best routes for the tracks to be laid on. The Council members agreed to support my plans, and from there we got down to work.

Surveying the land could be done much quicker from the sky than from the ground, so Uraia and I divided the surveying work between us. Brumli was too busy to join us in surveying the kingdom; he was flying to each state to instruct the blacksmiths on how to manufacture the rails that we needed, and he was overseeing the manufacturing of the first proper steam locomotive, and he was also overseeing the commencement of mining operations at the new iron mine in the east. I worried that Brumli was taking on too much and I talked to him about slowing down and taking on less responsibility, but he assured me that once the mine was up and running and the blacksmiths trained he would be able to remain in Galand and spend all his time on the locomotive.