The first major issue I've come to realize is that rails are heavy and take a lot of material. Over the course of a month, we've gotten a roller mill and smelting facility made to produce rails and rail connectors. They're relatively easy to shape with a roller mill, but each 35 foot rail section comes in at three quarters of a ton of steel. That's a lot of material to move about and ship, let alone mine. Our iron production back on Kembora is about 40 tons of iron a day. We've built up some amount of stockpile as we've slowed down the production of tanks, but we're still making ships and trade goods, so realistically, we can probably utilize about 10 tons for railway related tasks a day.

While there is basalt in places on the dwarven continent, there is a lot less of it. This is clearly continental crust, meaning it's generally comprised of lighter elements. If there was a ready supply of basalt, I'd have probably just had us make a new steel factory here on the mainland. Instead, we'll have to ship in the steel we need. At two rails per 35 feet per track and 10 tons of available steel a day, that means that we're only producing about one and one-third miles of track a month for one rail. Initially, we'll definitely just build out the one track, but in the future, we should come back and pair it to support multiple trains traveling at a time.

Realistically though, we do need even more steel production. Even if it is just one rail, the dwarven capital is over 100 miles away, meaning we'd be building on the scale of decades to connect various locations. Because mana density decreases the further you get from the mana crystal on Kembora, other facilities that we add on will have to be smaller. The original dam powered facility produced about 10 tons of steel a day, and it could realistically be sized down to half that if necessary. Based on my calculations, I'd expect that the side of the island that Kembora City is on could support a few additional 10 ton a day facilities, if we're smart about locations, and the far side could handle multiple 5 ton facilities.

I've begun drafting up the designs to send to Zeb for those facilities, along with information on how to use a manascope to pick appropriate locations for factories that require a lot of mana to operate. Even a single 10 ton production facility would double the rail production speed if rail production receives all of it. Ever since we've had the dwarves on the island, we've had an extreme excess of basalt for processing, though I don't know what the average production of it comes down to. I do know that a ton of locations have been identified that could be mined if necessary to keep up with production needs, so it should be possible to do so.

There is another important aspect of railways that I had to handle before we could actually start building out the rails, and that was related to slope and turns. Both turns and slope negatively impact how much a single locomotive can pull. Based on what I've seen along the dwarven coasts versus the interior, I think it'd be best if we established two rail codes. One code for the coastal plains, which realistically can be built with a much more gentle grade and wider turns, and a code for the interior, where we'll have to deal with higher grades and sharper turns.

In practice, that means a lot of planning and design around how these two rail networks will interact, and surveying to determine where tracks will be built. For example, our trade city is on a coastal plain about two miles from the foothills nearby. Despite it being a coastal plane, there is still quite a bit of variation in elevation between the city and the foothills. For the coastal planes, I think the functional maximum grade we'll be able to work with is 0.75%. I'd like it to be lower, and in some places, we'll probably be able to keep it lower, but in order to actually be able to build through this region, that'll be the case.

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For the interior, however, the maximum grade is probably going to have to be closer to 2.5 or 3%. Long term, the idea would be that wherever these two rail networks meet, there needs to a rail yard where train cars can be dropped off. I won't know the specifics until I'm able to run tests, but the trains may be limited to a quarter or fewer cars of what they'd be able to handle on the gentler coastal network. Thankfully, or perhaps naturally, quite a few of the valleys that connect the interior of the continent to the coasts already have cities situated in them, meaning they would be natural locations for such rail yards.

I plan to spend the next month devising surveying tools useful for building out railroads as well as training a handful of individuals on how to operate the tools and plan railroads. Then we'll plot out the first rail from us to the foothills as well as the rails that need built in the city. Hopefully in that time, I'll get a response from Zeb as to how soon additional steel could be expected, if at all.

The initial surveying equipment designs I came up with were actually relatively easy to make, since we've been producing telescopes and rangefinders. The first piece of equipment was relatively easy to make. By attaching a crosshair to the front of the telescope and hanging a plumb bob from it, one can relatively easily determine the slope from where they currently sit to the place in the crosshair. The second equipment piece was a modified rangefinder. This lets you mark a horizontal position on a disk, based on where the rangefinder is looking, then you can mark a second location after turning the rangefinder, letting you determine the angle between those two spots. This is useful for determining how wide of a curve you will need for placing track.

I realized as I developed those pieces of equipment that I needed to set rules on how wide a turn radius can be for the trains, and how wider radii affect the amount of allowable slope for that section. Further, a small amount of angle to the two halves of the track can further reduce issues, essentially allowing the train to tilt into the turn slightly. Based on the rail car length of 45 feet that I designed, and the 80 foot long locomotives, I've made an estimate that the minimum turn radius should probably be around 600 feet for the rails.

That guess is by no means perfect, and I packed a lot of extra safety space into it, so it might be overkill. In essence, I have an estimate of how much force the locomotive is exerting on the car behind it, the angle that forms between that car and the next, and the amount of gravitational force the car is under to keep it on the tracks. There were other considerations as well, but essentially, that gave me an idea of how wide things would have to go to prevent the cars from being pulled off the rails by a turn.

Those calculations also gave me an idea as to how much force was being lost as tangential force in the curve, which let me make a chart to say what the allowable slope on the curve would be for various radii. That chart was essentially based on the heaviest allowable train load, which then compared the additional gravitational force the train would have to fight against on a 0.75% grade, versus the lost force in a turn. From making that chart, I also came to realize that the nearest foothills will actually be more difficult to connect to than the foothills a little further away. In order to keep to the chart, we'd actually have to use more rail snaking back and forth with additional turns to reach the closest ones safely.

I haven't even started training anyone yet, and it's been 25 days. I did at least get a response from Zeb that he'll look into expanding steel production, but it'll be at least 4 months, meaning the start of next year, before anything comes online. That said, four additional months means we'll definitely have enough rail stockpiled by then that we'll be able to have the port and foothills hooked up to the rail system by then. I've already started considering where we should build a rail yard here. Since it's practically an inland port it will take quite a bit of planning to design.

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