I decided the best training practice would involve actually having the demons I wanted doing this long term helping me with the first railroad layout, so that's what I did. As it would turn out, planning out railway paths takes quite a bit of time, and involves a lot of working with individuals who's houses or farms are in the way. Thankfully, at least, most of the crops are harvested already, so it wasn't like we were disrupting existing production. Our basalt tailings are a bit too fine grained to be useful for railway ballast, which means that we'll be utilizing at least one of our rock crushers to make our own ballast for the railway. The tailings, however, do have a use as part of a subgrade for us to compact down before putting the ballast down, so we plan on receiving shipments of that moving forward.

The chosen foothill area for the first railway to be built to is going to require 5 miles of railway to reach it. Before that though, we'll have to build out all the rails in the city. One of the many components in the rail production facility is a curve bending machine, like what we use for ship production to allow us to make precise curved pieces. Rather than using wooden ties, given our lack of good preservation materials and the generally softer nature of woods on this planet, we're using stone ties attached and shaped with stoneshaping. The actual installation doesn't require much stoneshaping at least.

The plan is for a portion of the new quarry site in the foothills to be dedicated to creating railroad ties for us to use. Any broken ties, or odds and ends will be added in with some amount of fresh stone to be crushed to make the necessary ballast. Getting the railway path chosen and training the other demons on how to do the necessary math and tool operation took us forty days. Once we actually start some construction, I'll see what additional tools we need to speed assembly up. We'll be using some of the tools we developed for shipbuilding, utilizing rivets to attach rail sections together with plates.

Building a railway is hard work, especially when it's the first section. We worked for 20 days before I had have us backtrack some. We recently had a demon prestige and unlock imp summoning here in the trade city, so I've been utilizing new goblins to do a lot of manual labor. There are a few downsides to this. First, they're not getting the same sort of education that they'd normally get on Kembora. Long term, they're prospects are pretty much going to be limited to building railways. The good news is that we'll have plenty of railways for them to build.

The second problem is that new goblins aren't exactly strong. A lot of the labor we have need for is lifting the heavy rail pieces and shoveling subgrade and gravel, and compacting it. So it's been taking three or four goblins to do the work of one higher level demon in that regard. As we started building some of the rails, I ultimately had to have them pull the rails back up, and there was a pause on construction as I had to design a new device for them to use to compact the subgrade appropriately.

What that called for was a steamroller. Its a pretty straightforward device to make if we utilize our existing engines that we use for tanks. Essentially, its just one or two heavy, solid drums with some amount of vibration. The alternative method is to instead utilize far more stoneshaping to adjust foundations and build the rail system in a much more complicated way, similar to how we built roads on the island. While that will work for building in the city, and even possibly for the short distance to the foothills, it isn't really feasible to do that for the thousands of miles of railway I'd like to build.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

This didn't completely stop us from being able to do construction though. The teams working on construction were still able to move the subgrade to where it needed to go and put down the initial lines before a steamroller will eventually level it. They were also able to pile the gravel and rail nearby so that they won't be waiting on deliveries at that point.

It was pretty close, but after 33 days I got the steamroller built and working. It was running just a few days before they finished having the entire path ready to be compacted, which meant that ultimately, they were able to continue working behind the roller in sections, putting ballast down for it to be steamrolled next. We got word from Zeb that our steel shipments would be doubled soon as they've completed a 10-ton a day factory.

I'm going to start setting aside some of the steel from each shipment though, since what we need now are the actual engine and railcars, rather than more rails. That means I need to create a factory and assembly yard for it. Ideally, the factory will be connected to the city railyard so that we can easily deploy and repair things as needed.

There is a large benefit to building out the rail to the foothills first, and that is that any flaws that we discover in the rail line are on an internal industrial line. After 45 days, they've finally started the process of attaching the rails, so while we haven't run into any issues so far, I expect we'll learn a lot when we actually go to run a train. I've been working on the manufacturing for a locomotive, which I've determined that I'll need to recruit some of the individuals from Kembora who worked on tanks to come assist. That was already part of the plan before, so it wasn't something unexpected.

I'm hoping to have the first engine done in another month or so. The railcars will be a lot easier to make though, so I'm hoping we can make them pretty quickly in comparison. Word is that we might get even more steel soon, which would be good. We've been slowly expanding our population here and the initial demons have started to gain prestiges. We'll probably start dedicating a decent number of them to mining the foothills for stone so that some get stoneshaping. The foothills are close enough to the mana crystal in the trade city that mana regen is still quite high, so that could be valuable in the future for making rail ties.

Based on what I've heard, we should be ready to install a mana crystal on our second island for the academy near the end of this year. Unlike the previous trip, this time we're planning on leaving the crystal largely unshielded as we move it, to hopefully repel any leviathans from the area. We plan on slowly raising it out of the ground over the course of a few weeks, slowly increasing it's exposure as we do so. The idea is that we'll create an overlap in the low mana zones, then as you move one crystal, that low mana zone extends outward continuously, preventing any would be leviathan interlopers from getting involved.

There are some risks involved in doing it that way, as we don't necessarily know how the eagles will react, or if any remnant leviathans are around how they might be attracted to the ship transporting it. On the other hand, if we did it the other way, shielding the crystal with quartz until we unbox it on the island, there is a chance that we'd have to repeat the whole leviathan hunting process. That would be incredibly disruptive to our trade, possibly setting us years back, and violating dozens of trade agreements we have with the mainland.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.