Story Notes: The Wagon Repair Mare and 16: Far Away from Home · 4:24pm Nov 25th, 2018
Sorry for the delay in these notes . . . I simply didn’t have time to finish them, what with everything else that was going on.
Especially once the addition of my hot water heater leaking threw yet another wrench in the works.
I’ll start with Wagon Repair Mare, since that’s the story that more people care about, and the one that has the most technical details to it.
Wych Elm--or Felly to her friends--is named for the wood that’s preferred for the nave, and her nickname is an alternate name for felloes. We’ll be discussing those parts later on in the blog post, so don’t worry yet that you might not know what they are.
Truckle is named for a Truckle cart. Interestingly, I have had trouble pinning down an exact meaning for the word ‘truckle.’ It’s a name for a barrel of cheese or a barrel-shaped cylinder of cheese, especially cheddar, but that’s not what the carts were used for. They were a welsh design, and basically a simple flatbed wagon with a tailgate that appears fixed in place.
That’s literally the only picture I can find of one; anybody who lives in the UK, if you find a better picture, or more information about truckle carts, put a link in the comments.
I should also mention ‘Spuds’ Terkel. He’s based off Studs Terkel, who was a radio journalist who loved interviewing the common man. People who did ordinary jobs, the ones that nobody tended to care about. I got inspired to write Interview with a Cab Driver after his own interview with a cab driver, and when Brumby Run said that he’d read a story about a pony fixing a wheel, that felt like the perfect way to frame it.
Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” touched on some lesser-known people, but of the ones I’ve listened to, I don’t think that he was as enamored of the common man as Studs. I also think that Mike Rowe and the show Dirty Jobs could very much be the successor to Studs.
Wagon wheels are a bit more complicated that they look, but not terribly so. I’m not claiming that I could design one, but in terms of overall design, they’re pretty straightforward.
This one’s a cannon wheel, in case you were wondering what all the tools on the right side of the image were (they’re for loading the cannon).*
It’s also worth noting that in this image, it has the alternate spelling of ‘fellies’ instead of ‘felloes’. I mentioned this in the blog series about harnesses, there’s a lot of variation in the names of things. The nave is also called the hub; and felloes are also called fellies or fellows, and there are probably other names for those parts as well. The spokes are generally always called the spokes.
________________________________________
*Remember when I blogged about harnesses, and mentioned singletrees and doubletrees? If you look carefully in the image, you’ll notice that the axle is called the axletree.
The short version of how a wooden wheel is constructed is that the nave is built first. It’s constructed much like a barrel, with a series of strakes put in a circle, cut to receive the spokes. That’s held together in compression by iron hoops, generally, which are either pounded over the strakes cold, or heated to expand them, and then put in place--when they cool, they’ll pull the strakes tight.
Spokes radiate outward from that. Traditionally, there are at least two spokes for every felloe. They generally have a rectangular foot at the nave end (see the rectangular holes in the nave in the illustration above) and round tongue pegs at the felloe end.
The felloes themselves are arcs of wood, pinned together with dowels to make a continuous rim. Once the entire wheel is assembled, a hot iron hoop is put around it and when it’s cooled, it puts the whole wheel in compression, which makes it very strong. Some wheels instead of using many short felloes pinned together used only two, which were steamed and bent into shape rather than being cut as the short ones were.
Obviously, over the centuries of wooden wagon wheels, there were many design changes. One important one for the ponies is that in the industrial era, cast hubs/naves became available, presumably in standard sizes. [In fact, a lot of the ironwork for wagons could be bought out of a catalog, and you or a carpenter would build the rest of it.]
In real life, at least in the US, there are specialty trucks that repair over the road trucks by the side of the road when they break down.
Some of them specialize just in tires, while others have the tools and equipment to perform minor mechanical repairs, often enough to get the truck to a proper service center under its own power. Some places also have similar rescue vehicles for cars; they’ve got tools to change a tire (with your spare, of course), gas in case you ran out, jump start cables, maybe a lockout kit. . . .
There’s no reason why a pony city wouldn’t have exactly the same thing. Although we don’t tend to see the streets of Manehattan being crowded with ponies and wagons, historically, that’s exactly what it was like.
There’d be no lack of business for a pony like Wych Elm, even if she kept herself to a somewhat small area in the city. Between road conditions, minor collisions, and lack of proper wagon maintenance, she would always have work to do.
[In case you’re thinking about Ponyville now, I think that what they’d generally do is leave the wagon where it broke and go get repair parts or a spare wheel or get the wheelwright . . . I don’t think that Ponyville has enough traffic to warrant a repair patrol.]
Cipher Splash is a background unicorn. According to her trading card, nopony knows what her cutie mark means.
Source
Blue Belle is a background unicorn
From the ant-sized Wiki
Lilac Notes is a background unicorn
Source
The Tasty Treat is the restaurant that Saffron and Coriander run in Canterlot.
There really are two three Hyatts in Atlanta, all within about a mile (as the crow flies) of the Mercedes Benz stadium.
One final note, which really has nothing to do with the story but which I think is interesting. Many of my readers will have come across the word nave in a church setting, rather than in a wagon wheel setting.
Both of those words, although spelled the same, have completely different etymology. A church’s nave comes from the Latin navis, meaning ship. A wheel’s nave comes from the Sanskrit nābhis, meaning navel, and according to my mom’s Oxford dictionary, also ‘boss’ as in a shield boss (which it does resemble). Two words, both pronounced and spelled the same, and yet they come from entirely different roots.
Ah the english language mugging other languages for spelling, grammar and pretty much everything else since the day it evolved.
In English, isnt the word, SET, up to about 125 different meanings now?
Those two with the mail cart always puzzled me. Its a very small cart for so many in the team, and its a bit piled with no sheeting for such a path. I mean, fireswamps have fire, which with the wrong non pegasus controlled breeze can ignite the load? Or in the swamp you have damp air and dripping, and no sign of even a half decent single track hard packed gravel track, never mind stone militery roads?
Maybe thats why rough tracks are still prefered even with persistant traffic. We had ultra advanced quality Roman roads 2000 years ago, all the Meadaevil tracks are rough mud 1000 years ago, and its only in the last 200 years or so weve got back to decent roads again?
4972747
Or, if it is a Pegasus-drawn cart, why does a broken wheel matter at all?
'tis funny, I work in a shipping/receiving warehouse, and that street view of all those wagons makes an eerie amount of sense. Put aside the fact that it's outdoors, and full of ponies, and that arrangement looks exactly like any loading dock setup you'd find today. I must say, I'd rather unload those than what I spent my last twelve hours at work unloading...
4972774
Now imagine the chaos of Unicorn delivery cart pullers pulling the Paperboy competition, Where they race down the street, and magic the induvidual boxes to the shops as they go by.
Now think of modern superstore to the door deliveries doing the same with a large cargo wagon carrier and drones.
4972781
All things being equal, I think I'd rather trust the alien with my mail, rather than the semi-autonomous robot. Good luck teaching a computer to understand common sense thoughts such as "hey, there's no 509 address here, maybe I should check 506 to be sure."
4972784
Im working on it. As an aside, check Googles latest anouncement of bidirectional prediction for analyzing text so the comptuer can guess missing words. Works extremely well.
Now consider that Bi Predictional probability coding hardware at up to Ghz speeds already exists in your dirt cheap MPEG DVD player from a couple decades back.
Truckle carts are so named because they have the oldest type of wheel, the solid wheel, hence they became named from the latin for wheel - "trochlea".
There's a few notes at the bottom of this page and an image around the middle.
There's a tiny bit of info here also.
Neat to see the wagon repair mare on her rounds. Reminds me of the time I got assistance from LA's countywide freeway service patrol
That seems really sad.
4972991
Or ver-r-r-r-y mysterious. Wooo.
4972730
Yeah, that’s pretty much how it works. Although the one meaning (hub) the Germans nabbed first, and we stole it from them.
4972747
I wouldn’t be surprised. Now I’m kind of curious what the word is in English that has the most meanings.
You know, I never noticed until now that those were both pegasi.
Yeah, the broken wheel shouldn’t be an issue, at least as far as getting out of the fire swamp. Unless neither of them know how to fly with a cart.
Two pegasi might not be overkill for a wagon being pulled on the ground; I’d assume that pegasi generally aren’t that good at that.
There are some advantages to unpaved roads, if properly designed and maintained, but for heavy traffic in all sorts of weather conditions, I don’t think that there’s much that’s affordable and also durable. As for the Roman roads, how many 80,000 pound trucks going seventy did those roads have to handle?
4972774
I have to imagine that the idea of a loading dock (in cities, at least) predated semi trucks. It’s a logical arrangement, at least if your horses know how to back up--which I’d assume most were trained to do.
The downside to the horse-powered city, at least historically, was the vast amounts of horse manure that clogged the streets. Someone did a blog about that, and of course I can’t remember who, but it had some horrifying pictures.
4972838
That makes sense. Thanks!
Also, thanks for the links. I saw the one with the Welsh carts when I was researching, but it didn’t give any mention as to why it was called ‘truckle’ and not anything else. The other link looks like it’s got lots of good pictures for researching purposes.
4972877
I know a number of big cities have freeway service patrols of some sort or another (the Ohio Turnpike does, I believe, and I think Chicago does as well (and obviously LA). I think that there are some in the metro Detroit area, too, like along the 96/696/275 corridor. It’s really not a bad idea, but you probably can’t really justify them for more rural areas.
4973390
Had anyone else said that my first thought would have been "was it biscuit?"
4972991
You’d think so, but also according to her trading card, “She kind of likes it that way.”
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/5/13/625446__safe_solo_ccg_enterplay_blue_canterlot+nights_faraday_cipher+splash.jpeg
4972994
Cipher prefers that ponies not know.
Which probably means she’s into some illegal stuff.
4973393
Yeah, I’m kind of surprised it wasn’t me, to be honest.
4973388
The A15 in Lincolnshire between Lincoln and York is one road that springs to mind, the A5 from London to Holyhead, the A56 heading out of Manchester towards Ribchester. I know many follow the oriigonal routes, but at 12 yards or so wide, thats a 4 lane road? With dedicated ditches and subsurface drainage? In the local town, the main road is 250 years old and almost all the stone retaining walls are not just origional but barely maintained, although theres some slippage where Victoran houses along the sides have been removed, greatly reducing the butressing effects.
Its a lot harder to make a good road these days, because all the really good stone was used up a centuary ago and the quarries cant be reopened due to newts and noise etc.
4973411
A lot of places over there, I can imagine that being an issue. I know when I spent a bit of time in rural Scotland, some of the roads appeared to be paved sheep paths . . . probably for the better, you guys don’t seem to like the idea of knocking down whole neighborhoods so you can build a new 6-lane superhighway. Famously in San Francisco, they stopped a highway project that was going to run in part through a park, since the city already owned the land. San Franciscoans didn’t like the idea of their park being replaced by a highway.
To an extent, some of the old stone could surely be re-used. And as for concrete road surfaces, there’s a production process they’re working on in Germany that recycles the old concrete and lets it be used again in high ratios for new construction (I think they’re currently testing a 50/50 mix of new and old).
4975110
Latest I heard is trying the really cheap waste stuff, gigatons of coal station ash, steel works slag etc. Getting some very good results.
4975116
The potential risk with ash especially is that it might be slightly radioactive, and I think there’s some other nasties in it. There could be the same possible problems with steel works slag. That’s probably not an insurmountable problem, but it is an issue.
Also fly ash is super abrasive, which probably doesn’t matter once it’s in the concrete mix, but might be before that. That’s why coal turbine locomotives never went anywhere--the fuel was cheap, but the maintenance costs were through the roof.
Well, "truckle" also shows up in truckle bed. I'm not sure where it came from there, either, though.
...Though, looking at that picture, are you sure they weren't used for moving barrels? Because I'm not sure that cart actually has a bed, vs, just an open space there, with something large meant to rest on the beams with the tail"gate" stopping it from sliding/rolling off the back. That is just working from trying to interpret one picture, though; I've no idea if that interpretation is accurate.
Sadly, some of the images appear to be broken.
And I stopped reading the blog post where it moved into covering the other story I hadn't read (sorry, but I still have more to do after this before FIMFiction is clear for Saturday, and the Monday sun is now lighting the sky), but thank you for writing it, and the story. :)