The first engine ended up taking 42 days to be assembled and another 14 days of testing before I was comfortable with it being used. I'm starting to feel the time pressure a bit to ensure that everything with rails works before the end of the year. Once the new crystal is installed on the Academy island, I'd like to shift my focus there. We should have a few basic railcars made in a few days, at which point we can try out a train in full.

There is still a lot of work to be done in the railyard and docks though to properly support the trains. We need to install cranes in various locations alongside loading and unloading areas for properly handling and unloading containers used for shipping. Boxcars and other railcars are obviously quite useful themselves, but there is some amount of benefit of having a railyard in major cities where you can quickly load and unload large containers, where you could then have workers distribute goods into other trains or carts to reach their final destination.

Zeb also sent word that they'll have another 10 tons of steel capacity online soon, and that half of it will be shipped here for work while the other half will be utilized on the island. With the rail to the foothills completed, I've had the workers begin laying rail for the railyard. We'll probably start stockpiling rail once that is complete in the near future. The rail to the foothills shouldn't ever need to be expanded to two tracks, so all the extra rail we make will likely just be stored until we have a use for it. That probably won't happen until we can convince Kao that connecting our port to the dwarven capital with rails is beneficial.

Railcars were pretty easy to make, since all I needed was to make a machine to take steel plates and corrugate them. Then, it was just a matter of attaching corrugated steel plates in shapes to hold materials. Obviously, a large amount of the railcars aren't made of corrugated steel, but for making things like shipping containers and hoppers, the additional structural strength is a huge benefit. Ultimately, after 33 days of designing out some different kinds of railcars, building a few machines, and designing loading and unloading areas, we were ready for a trial run.

I designed a rudimentary passenger car so that workers going to and from the foothills could also enjoy an easier trip, since otherwise it was about a 4 mile hike to the destination. Despite my best design efforts, it was obvious from the first trip that some work could be done to improve a ton of aspects of the train. That said, it works well enough that I'm not keen on spending a lot of time on it right now. I'd rather classify it as something to work on at the academy instead. There is quite a bit of work to do designing infrastructure to handle large scale logistics still here that would benefit from my attention more than making the train itself run smoother.

After the success of the first rail run, I began the work to design improvements for infrastructure to support the rails and port. Over the last 77 days, I've worked on quite a few minor projects. The first thing we needed was a more ready supply of clean water for replenishing the train engine. Similar to the tank, we're actually condensing the steam back into water to allow the train to run longer without being refueled, but it still needs fresh water every so often, and needs to be cleaned out periodically.

I designed the locomotive with ease of refueling in mind, so it's designed to be gravity fed from above. For now, we've been hand feeding the water, but I've designed a water tower that can be installed to allow the train to be refilled more easily. I have a request in for a pump from Kembora to be shipped and installed along the freshwater stream for us to pump the water to the water tower.

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To complement the train, I've also designed a railcar for transporting water. If the train has to go an exceptionally long time without access to freshwater, you could pull as many of the fluid cars behind it as necessary. Without rubber, however, its hard to flexibly connect liquids reliably between railcars, they would still need to use buckets to move the water into the locomotive.

We've also built out some storage areas for stockpiling rails, rail ties, ballast, and subgrade. For each of these, we've also built special containers for holding them that can easily be loaded into railcars that are easy to unload. Since subgrade comes from Kembora currently, its now brought over in the specialty containers so it can easily be loaded into railcars moving forward.

The daily route to and from the foothills with the train has drastically improved the amount of material we've been able to bring back for construction, and reduced the number of workers we've needed to dedicate to achieve said amount. It'll still take some time before the amount of labor we put into the train pays itself off, but it is at least clear that its an improvement.

I'll have to see if I can arrange a meeting with our diplomat on the dwarven continent to show him the rail system. I'd like for him to have a good idea of it so that he can start showing some of the dwarven leaders the whole thing. Ideally, I'd have him start negotiating with them to have us install rails around the island soon. I believe we've handled a lot of what we need to for that to become a reality.

Getting a message to the dwarven capital then waiting for our diplomat to arrive took 24 days. From there, I took six days showing him everything and discussing how best to try to market this capability to the dwarves. It won't be very easy to market it to them, it seems. Since each province is fairly self-sufficient and the only provinces that rely moderately on trade are those along the inland sea. However, it shouldn't be impossible.

He thinks that it might be possible to convince Kao to connect the capital to some of the trade cities on the inland sea. The valley that the capital sits in faces out towards the open ocean, and while it has a lot of connected valleys and a wide expanse of coastal plains, the ability to move goods from the trade ports to the rest of the continent is a bit slow. To some degree, this is probably why the country was so thoroughly overrun once the demons got a large enough foothold. Since the country was already recovering from their civil war, getting new supplies to the further reaches simply took too long.

The downside to this is that we can't easily just build a railway from their capital to the far side of the island. It will be faster for us to first build a railway to the dwarven capital from our trade city, then build out the other railways. That would end up being quite costly to do, which is what makes it tricky. It's not my problem to negotiate it though, it's the diplomat's. I can only tell him how much of what we have, and what I consider to be a reasonable rate.

I decided that I'd set out to return to Kembora just before winter. I wanted to be present there when it came time to move the new crystal to what will become the academy since anything could happen, and I wanted to be there to measure mana levels and see firsthand any odd effects that might arise. What that meant was that I ended up spending another 55 days in our trade city. The only information I got from our diplomat was that he was in the process of negotiating.

Since I did have a little extra time, I decided that I could perhaps increase the likelihood of the dwarves being willing to have railroads installed by working on the passenger cars some more. While most dwarven nobles travel in decent carriages already, if I can make some example railcars that are both more luxurious and more comfortable to ride in, it might help us convince some of the dwarves in the longer term to install a railway, if only so that their own diplomatic travels are easier and more comfortable. Plus, a railcar is large enough that you can actually fit a full office in it, meaning that travel time doesn't have to be wasted. When I left to return to Kembora, I sent a note off to the diplomat to have him come look at the new railcars when he gets a chance so that he could use it for negotiating if necessary.

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