Of Blood and Steam · 9:26am May 13th, 2015
((HERP DERP got it wrong, that distance is the distance of Britain's entire coastline. My apologies, I'm an idiot. Idiocy resolved))
The coast of England is 5581 miles long. A good 19th century steam train can travel 70mph, which without stopping would take about 80 hours to travel rounded up. Or 3 full days and change.
Now stopping for water every ten miles (a nice round number) adds to the travel time dramatically, which steam trains had to do often, in this case it would add a further 558 hours to the journey, or another 23 days. 26 days in full, of which a minority of that time is actually spent traveling. Assuming a refill takes an hour, of course, if we want to be generous and say a refill takes half an hour, it still adds 279 hours to the journey, or roughly 11-12 days, which is 15 days in full. Better, but still terrible.
With the introduction of tenders, a special car that carried water on the train, it could go 100-150 miles without needing to be filled up. Lets say it'd take two hours to fill one up due to bullshit. (Because you are refilling both the steam engine's reservoir AND this big, fuck-off water tank car behind it) This would mean a train with a tender would need to make roughly 56 stops to refill on this journey, which adds 112 hours to the trip, or 5 days going by the 100 miles marker. So it would take you 8 days to travel the length of Britain in a straight line by steam locomotive.
Equestria is much bigger than Britain.
And this calculation assumes the state of Equestria's and other nations' rail and steam technology is at least on par of at least that of the early Victorian era and not hilariously slapdash, so I'm being generous here. It does not take into account layovers, time taken to refuel or let passengers on or off or the loading and unloading of goods or undue delays due to weather or damage/obstruction of the tracks and/or the occasional train robbery and minor war.
For your perspective, a healthy man could casually walk in and around 4mph, or, 96 miles a day if he were to walk nonstop like a bloody terminator. It'd take a man 58 days to walk that same distance in a straight line non stop, which is basically two fucking months. Keep that in mind next time you watch Lord of the Rings or read the next fic or novel where they just skip over the parts where the protagonist and their party are on the road. Trust the authors, you don't want to read about that shit. Its very boring.
I take to writing this out because it occurs to me I tend to summarize alot of Handy's journeys, the ones by train at least, happening over the course of perhaps a week or so. Sometimes more. In the modern mindset most can't imagine, truly, being stuck on a train all week. I however can do so very easily, as my job requires me to spend nearly four hours commuting round trip every day, over half of it is spent on a train, which takes me from Belfast to Newry in the space of an hour to an hour and a half with only 2 stops for 3 minutes. And that is only a distance of around 38 miles. Or a 102 miles from Dublin to Belfast, a two hour journey or thereabouts and I have become friends with daily super-commuters who make that trip twice every day. Those poor bastards.
If we were not using modern trains and were using steam trains, those journies would be unrecognizable longer, my daily commute just going one way from Newry to Belfast would be an extra three hours longer if we had to stop for water filling (assuming no tender) at the least. The journey from Belfast to Dublin would be nearly half a day's journey at the least. And that's still not taking into account stops, loading and unloading, extra train carriages for fuel, stops for refueling, etc.
Puts things into perspective for dear Handy doesn't it?
The backstory gives me an excuse to have steam powered trains for ease of transport and by God, I make use of them. And in the course of making my maps I have to give serious thought to average travel times (which is important when you are making a map by which to adventure to), even though I do not know the exact distance in meters and miles, I know, roughly, the pace of a man, the pace of an Earth horse (as opposed to a pony who's walking gait is smaller and closer to a human's in aggregate) the pace of a train and the pace of a small, unburdened vessel on the ocean. Know that and know how it relates to the pixels on your map and you can give a rough ballpark estimate of reasonably travel times without being anal about exact distances.
I do this a lot in the games I create on forums and the games I play, its second nature to me now, but not for most people. So when you see me say a train journey takes a week in Bad Mondays,
Just take my word for it.
Speechless. Follow earned.
i was wondering why i had followed you in the first place...now i know why.
3066346
3066357
I'm going to need to beg your forgiveness, I made a major error in my calculations. The distance stated for Britain is actually the distance of its entire coastline not its length.Mea Culpa.Other than that the calculations hold up, I'm just an idiot.I believe I have it fixed now.
have you ever played in the pathfinder kingdom building rules set?
a hex tile has a SIDE of around 20 miles (my friends and i THINK that is what they meant).
The ONE game we played with that was round robin GMing and i made ONE hex a plateau in the middle of a grassland sea.
ONE; and it acted as a mini mountain. Complete with ruins and a MINE. Also had a LAKE. Best capital city ever.
Ah, but Handy, do you know the flight speed of an unladen swallow?
3066451 Yes actually. Its critical to know by when another player in the game will receive my missive calling him to arms to raise his troops and where to meet me. So that I know how fast it'll be when I tie a letter to its leg. I'll know roughly when my ally receives the call to arms and then have a ball park estimate for when he gets to the rallying point, assuming he acts immediately, while traveling there.
Medieval logistics was a bitch.
The numbers are still quite wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Scotsman_%28train%29 - in 1862, the first 'special scotch express' ran.
This went 390 miles in 10.5 hours, or about 38 miles an hour, not the 29 you give as 'optimistic'.
Even in early days, refills did not take an hour.
You were not filling the train from buckets, but from a large elevated tank, with a wide bore pipe.
Steam trains - running uninterrupted - are not significantly slower than the service you quote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_North
The record times - in 1888 were 53MPH for the above journey - making four or five stops.
Before the 20th century, some services were touching 70MPH.
In many cases, the problems with timetabling were not technical as such.
Trains could run at speed on tracks, and refuel and rewater quite fast.
The problem is that each individual railway company had its own little territory, and would run trains on it - sometimes of different guages.
So a journey did not mean 'get on train in Dublin, get off at belfast' - but many interconnections.
I have not found a 19th century rail time from Dublin to belfast, partly for this reason.
Well, I misjudged how long travel takes in my story. Of course, my story has FTL travel, hyperspace geometry, and steam trains all on the same chapter, so make of that what you will.
3066528
Hang on, I think the confusion here is the distances involved, I am not measuring from the length of britain, as much as I am taking the length of england's coastline and then doing my calculations. Because it is a large number, but not stupidly so, to give some persepctive to the readers as to how it can take a week or more to get from one end of Equestria to another. (Because the country is stupidly big in BM verse in terms of landmass) If I used the example of London to Edinburgh direct, it'd be a much shorter number.
Alternatively, according to this list, passenger train speeds in the 19th century did average out in and around the numbers I give around 1850, but as you can see, over half of these examples need citations, so its likely an unreliable list. However the train I am citing from my purposes is this fellow here, who purportedly managed 80mph.
Sure if your comparing latter 19th century luxury express trains to, say, those that came easily 50 years earlier, of course I'm wrong. But thats like comparing early twentieth century cars to luxury endurance models of the 1960s, they're different, more evolved beasts. Early 19th century trains did indeed do well less than 100mph, (with the earliest, impractical locomotives doing less than 40mph, a right embarassments) you might as well compare my estimates to the A4 'Mallard' 4-6-2 and could reach 125 or 126 mph, the fastest steam locomotive in the world for its era, which is hardly fair or accurate.Also it should be stated freight trains will always be much slower than passenger trains. For obvious reasons.
So no, I cannot say I am wrong about this, 70mph is a good middle ground estimation for the 60-85 range of most long distance passenger steam trains of the era in real life and I am being generous in assuming the steam locomotives of the BM verse are up to par with any 19th century models from real life.
This is still accurate before we take in any considerations of refuelling, stopping to rewater or anything else.
i will concede the point on the filler towers, but the reason why I estimate it taking half an hour to an hour is because of several factors, one being that this world evidently does not have a reliable water cycle (or if it does, it needs regular maintenance), one cannot assume these towers will be well maintained or self refilling, even if they are the norm in this world (and for argument lets say they are) it is very likely train crews have a flight team of pegasi, griffons or some other races capable of manipulating the water from clouds into the convenient access port. This is more time consuming than it would be in our world and the trains do indeed go through large tracts of land that don't have reliable civilization nearby to maintain it for them. Several of these factors were noted in the chapter with the Equestrian Express chapters with the train stopping close to a waterfall near the tracks in the hinterlands of Gethrenia before doing the final leg of the journey, and that was a top of the line over-engineered freight train for this world.
Steam trains, running uninterrupted, are indeed as slow as I quote, unless you assume all trains in this world are using the flying scotsman as the base standard for their freight, when in reality none of the trains have reached that level yet.
And as for the Dublin example, I was openly acknowledging I was not counting other considerations into the time it would take to travel. I was stating the base technology and the sheer distances and assuming it was a straight line and no train journey in real life is just a straight line. I was not counting layovers, refueling, changing tracks or other considerations, which if I did, would only increase the length of time taken overall. I was taking the distance and following the logic as its a base standard, then from that standard we add and estimated how much longer it would take when you calculate in all the other bothers and inconveniences of steam train travel.
3066540 ...How do you go from Steam trains to warp travel in the space of a chapter?
You could always give the fucker vampire-esc wings.... It would help with the travel times but the logistics of travel would still be a factor (especially with his Armour being as heavy as it is) and, despite what everyone thinks, having wings would actually be a real pain in the ass when you think about it. The novelty of flying would soon give way to the thousands of announces that would come every time you try and sit down, sleep, or simply try too keep the things from snagging painfully as you walk around [his healing factor would keep them in shape but getting constant, superficial cuts on the fleshy membrane would still hurt like a bitch] . Not too mention they would be a massive, and perpetually vulnerable target during fights.
Plus, it would be interesting to see him try and deal with a pair of 'bat pony' wings slowly 'and painfully' growing out of his back.
3066597
Magic. Literally.
In my story, some variations of teleportation can go FTL, but only over short distances. Luna is the exception. However, for the average pony, steam trains and pegasus chariots are the only real methods of transportation.
Also, the magic in Canterlot castle can let you make six consecutive right turns without intersecting your previous path. It's a defense mechanism.
Interesting. Plus, there's duplication spells and transformative spells. Essentially, you could pack items that super-condense water into their structure and a unicorn with that specialty and you'd be good to go.
3066359 and thats why i follow you...
Seems like a good argument for air ships.
...For those who can afford the damn things.
3066610 Bah humbug. We need Bat and Wolf transformations!
But as you say. Having our "valiant hero" deal with two giant new appendages, which would be massively cumbersome on a human frame, could be fun.
Hmm... Very interesting. I have to admit, the only train I've ever been on is The Cog Railway up Pikes Peak (for those who don't know, a cog railway uses a gear to pull it up the track. Very usefull for going to the top of a mountain). Colorado (USA) had many railroad intersections back in the day, even one coming off the trans-continental railroad (perks of having a large mining industry, and being in the middle of the country). However, cars became far more practical for the topography of the state. As it turns out, mountains, foothills, and extreme elevation changes aren't ideal for trains. That, plus rockslides and avalanches, made cars and trucks more practical for travel.
All that to say, trains, short of a light rail in Denver, aren't a part of everyday life here, so that context is helpful. Does put things in perspective a bit.
It does raise the question though, why not power them by magic? Although, that wouldn't be practical for all races. Could use a steam turbine, though.