The failure of the pine baulk was not a slow sagging. It was an explosive rupture of tightly packed plant fiber. Under twelve tons of upright load, the lengthwise grain of the seasoned wood snapped along a slanted fault line running four feet from the bronze jack collar to the upper notch.
CRACK-SHREEEK.
Splinters the length of broadswords burst outward from the core of the timber, propelled by the violent release of stored elastic energy. Two-inch shards of jagged pine whipped through the sulfur mist like iron shrapnel. One jagged spear sliced through Doma Reel’s heavy woolen sweater. It opened a four-inch gash across the flesh of her right forearm. Another struck the brick pier behind her, pulverizing the lime mortar into a shower of white grit.
With the pine strut destroyed, the entire eight-ton mass of the stairs landing crashed downward onto the locomotive screw-jack.
The cast-iron tool had been engineered to lift stationary boilers under controlled upright posture. It had spent fifteen winters in the upkeep shed behind Platform Four, used by locomotive mechanics to true the driving axles of coal wagons. Its coarse double-start Acme threads were packed with dried lard, coal screenings, and sulfur scale. It was never designed to absorb a dynamic, quirky shock load dropped from a height of three inches. The cast-iron base plate, chilled and embrittled by twenty winters of coal damp, fractured cleanly across its center with a bone-shaking CLANG that rang like a cracked church bell.
