The Grantville Gazette - Volume 4 Part 28

"Yes it is busy, about as busy as I've seen Grantville in the last few years, before or after the Ring of

Fire. I wish Mike Sterns and Rebecca were here. They could put this much better, but I think that street is so busy because the people feel safe. And do you know why they feel safe, lieutenant?"

"Because of us, sir, that is, the army?"

"Bingo, Lieutenant, they feel safe because of us, and that means they trust us to protect them. Now how would you feel if the person who is supposed to protect you was dancing on the tables and falling down drunk?"

"Sir, for the drinking I've no excuse, but I wasn't dancing."

"But you did make a spectacle of yourself and pa.s.sed out in front of half the town. By this morning the other half has heard about it. And you did have to be carried back to your quarters. Lieutenant, I got a number of calls about you last night, all of them wanting you relieved from command. This is a small town and everything you do is noticed and talked about. Your private life is normally none of my business, but when it becomes public it becomes my business. You have to be a model, someone people

look up to and not a town joke. There are some people who are just waiting for you to screw up. And when you do, guess who gets the complaints?"

"General, I-"

"Stop, Lieutenant. I picked you for the job so I should get the complaints, but I don't want to hear any

more about anything we can avoid. You have to realize you live in a fishbowl and there are a lot of hungry cats just waiting for a chance. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"You have to know how important this rail project is. We need a way to supply Gustav's armies that is better than horses and wagons, and this is the best shot we have. In fact it is one of the most important projects we have right now. And from what I hear, you're doing a good job. If you don't know that, it is partially my fault. I should have visited your unit and let you know. So we're going there right now.

Besides, that tramway subsidiary of yours has made life a lot easier for people in Grantville."

"Now sir? We don't have anything prepared to show you. All we have is the track out to the farm and our training locomotive. It's not too impressive, sir."

"Call and have the engine and a flatcar meet us at this end of the track. We'll ride out on the train."

When they arrived at the railhead they saw Sergeant Hatfield, Corporals Toeffel and Rau with Private Schultz turning the lawn tractor locomotive around by picking it up off the tracks and rolling it around the flatcar. Corporal Lehrer and Private Schroder from the signal platoon were there, practicing hooking up a telegraph to an existing wire. As usual, the four men on the train crew were dressed in stained mechanics coveralls. All the NCOs stripes were painted on, upside down. Private Schultz was wearing a set of coveralls that were too small. Hatfield and Schultz had their up-time pistols in holsters, but Toeffel had two wheel lock pistols stuck in his belt. Rau had a sheathed knife that must have had fourteen inches of blade strapped to his leg. As a finis.h.i.+ng touch, all four were wearing ball caps with Blue Barn dog

food logos on them. Lehrer and Schroder were wearing clean overalls and also wearing Blue Barn dog food caps.

With Hatfield and his crew riding on the engine driven by Toeffel, there was plenty of room on the

flatcar for Elizabeth and the general.

"Tell me about this. What am I looking at?" General Jackson asked.

"Sir, all this line was laid by the original crew using the existing road as a roadbed; it's basically two-

foot gauge tracks using prefab rail sections. This runs out to Hatfield's father-in-law's farm where we have a turning wye. Then the rail branches into two lines and they head off into the woods. Total we have right now is about fifteen miles of track, not counting the wye, our storage yard and three sidings.

We tried using strap iron on the top of six-by-four-inch wooden rails to save material, but it kept breaking. Then we got lucky and found the twenty-pound rail that was used in the dog hole mines and on the lumber trails. The twenty pound is fine for narrow gauge, but if you want to make a higher capacity standard gauge line you'll need heavier track."

"And your people have put in this track since the project started?"

"Yes, sir. We're up to about one and a half miles a day on unprepared ground. This stretch on the road we averaged about two and a half miles a day. Right now we have about forty-five miles of track we have recovered, and we're building twenty miles of that into twenty-foot sections of prefab, with the rails

and ties already together. That lets us lay track just like a big toy train. If the lines are replaced with new made heavier rail the old rails can be reused."

The general looked at the engine, "Lieutenant that really is just a big lawn tractor isn't it? And why isn't

Hatfield driving? I thought he was your engineer?"

"Yes, sir. The engine has close to twenty-eight horsepower. We had to modify it to a 0-6-0 configuration to adequately transfer power to the tracks. Toeffel is driving because we're training rail crews as well as track crews. Corporals Toeffel and Rau are both trained drivers. Sergeant Hatfield likes to let both men

get more experience, so I would bet that Rau was driving on the trip into town. Private Schultz is trained to be a brakeman, though with just one car he's along for his muscle more than his skill."

"Hatfield," the general called out, "how many cars can that thing pull?"

"Ten is all we have overhauled right now, General, and we have pulled them all at one time, loaded.

Now that's on level ground. On a hill, it's about half that. But we're working on three more locomotives.

One is a bigger one using a Subaru with a four cylinder engine and four-wheel drive. It should be able to pull twice that load. You'll have to talk to Lieutenant Bicard and Sergeant Born about the horse-drawn cars. I don't know much about them," Anse answered.

"Lieutenant, how much can each car carry?"

"Sir, from what I can figure out, the coal cars are rated at two tons each, the lumber cars at five tons, and the flatcars at ten tons. However, we won't carry more than two tons a car because they start spreading the rails at about two and a half tons. We're also building some cars we can use for horse-drawn trams and they can carry about a ton and a half each."

"So on level ground with what is really a lawn tractor, you can move twenty tons at ten to fifteen miles

an hour. Is that about right, Lieutenant?"

"Yes sir, though it is much closer to ten than fifteen miles per hour. And we're getting better. Give us better equipment and we can lay track faster. As we get more coal cars overhauled, we'll be able to haul a lot of ballast to level out the roadbed and smooth over rough spots."

General Jackson appeared lost in thought as they rode to the end of the track where Sergeant Torbert had a group of recruits clearing ground. A horse-drawn railcar was nearby, loaded with prefabricated track sections.

After watching for a while, the general asked, "Those all your men, Lieutenant?"

"No sir. Most of them are from the First Volunteer regiment we're cross training. Torbert works well

with the recruits and we have cross trained about two hundred in track laying and clearing," Elizabeth answered.

"And what are they doing?" the general continued.

"They are laying what we call a training fork. They put in a switch on the branch and run a set of rails

out in to the woods for about a mile and a half. They have to clear and level the ground first for the length of the fork. They have some prefab track sections ready to lay, and we're using the horse-drawn trams to transport the sections to them. Right now we have four forks, but they can be removed and the rail reused."

"Well, let's head back," said the general.

At the end of the rail they found that the crew had turned the engine around ready to head back.

"I want to stop at your headquarters and see your camp, Lieutenant," General Jackson said.

They arrived at the camp just as Sergeant Schmidt was feeding the first s.h.i.+ft.

"What is that thing, Lieutenant, a stove on wheels?" the General asked.

"That's our field kitchen, General. I based the burners on my grandpa's crawfish boiler and the chief had

it made in a metal shop in town. We laid a special siding for it as practice with switches," Elizabeth answered.

"I like it. And this is your design?"

"Well, yes. With the chief's help, sir. Want a closer look?"

General Jackson walked over to look at the kitchen. As he got closer he saw that the mess car was just one of the improvements; there were garbage cans and immersion heaters running off a bottled gas tank that was on a rail car parked behind the kitchen car. The soldiers were was.h.i.+ng their tin plates and forks in heated water. In front of the mess car was a water tank mounted on rail wheels.

Just then Sergeant Schmidt saw him. "Want some fish, General? We have enough for everyone. I'll get you some. Grab a plate and wash it and your hands. No one gets fed unless they wash up. The lieutenant is a 'Teufel' for was.h.i.+ng."

"I haven't heard that sort of lecture since I was in Basic Training," said Jackson.

"Sir, if there's anything I learned from my daddy it's the importance of field sanitation. He used to think

it was a pain in the rear end. But he read an article in The Field Artillery Journal years ago about how the Afrika Korps had a large amount of soldiers who couldn't fight because they were sick. When he took my brother and me to France we walked through some of the British cemeteries from the First World War. He always got angry about how many men died needlessly from disease."

She continued, "I didn't know anything about the old way of doing things with mess kits, but between the chief and the up-time sergeants who were in the Army, we came up with the immersion heaters and the basic setup. The first sergeant told me that the old immersion heaters used dripping gasoline, which struck me as dangerous and a pain to deal with. So they came up with one that would use natural gas instead."

General Jackson was amazed by what he was seeing. "Lieutenant, I want to bring Ed Piazza and Greg Fererra out here to see this. We need a field kitchen and this plan would be perfect. We could mount it on a wagon instead of a rail car. What else do you have to show me?"

Elizabeth led him to her field office, where PFC Bode called up on the company computer the design for the field shower unit and a design for tent heaters that would run off the same bottled gas as the kitchen.

Then they went to the shop tent to meet PFC Dressel, the company blacksmith and to see the natural gas/ coal-fired forge that Sergeants Hatfield and Torbert had come up with for making small critical parts from sc.r.a.p steel.

After that, Elizabeth took him to the signal shack, which was a purpose built car with a telegraph station on board as well as the company's one radio. "We started training telegraph operators before we got the radio and it wasn't too difficult to cross train the telegraphers to send Morse over the radio," Elizabeth explained to General Jackson.

"Eighteen miles of railroad, three hundred troops trained to lay track, trained engine crews, trained horse- drawn trams, you're making your own parts and your troops eat better than any in the field. You know, you have done a h.e.l.l of a job, Major."