By seven in the evening, the second repair bay of Track Two smelled like a shipyard in the middle of a winter refit.
Venn and eight wagon drivers had hoisted the two-meter turntable wheel into a massive timber A-frame built from twelve-inch squared bridge oak. Four one-inch iron tie-bolts were driven through the base timbers directly into the foundation stonework beneath the floorboards, secured with three-inch square washers and double nuts that Venn tightened with a four-foot socket wrench until the wood groaned and cried dark sap.
The central axle—a four-inch shaft of cold-rolled royal steel salvaged from a locomotive tender—sat cradled in twin bronze pillow blocks packed with graphite grease. Venn kicked the rim with his heavy boot. Then, the great gray wheel revolved on its bearings with a silent, hypnotic smoothness that drew an admiring nod from every mechanic on the tracks.
From the iron rim of the wheel, a one-inch braided hemp thick ship rope ran up to an eight-inch iron snatch-block chained to the overhead roof girder, then plunged down into the check pit beneath the floor. In the pit sat a timber skid loaded with twenty-one bars of cast pig-iron from Melli’s melted rock waste-beds, each bar stamped with the royal crown and weighing exactly twenty pounds. Four hundred and twenty pounds of dead iron hung on the cable, counterbalanced only by the friction of the bronze hub and the wooden wedges Venn had jammed under the rim.
