Inside the cavernous brick erecting hall of the Grey Crag Roundhouse, the surrounding air tasted of rotten-egg coal smoke, warm machine grease, and boiled river water.
Lord Giles Croft stood on the timber staging gallery fifteen feet above the pit floor. He held an oiled rag and a pair of dial measuring tongs. Below him, resting squarely upon six sixty-inch cast-steel driving wheels, sat Hauler Zero-One. A hundred-and-twenty-ton, 2-8-2 Mikado heavy mountain-freight-type heavy freight locomotive christened by the foundry smiths as The Iron Drake.
Its tube-shaped boiler stretched thirty-two feet from the firebox throat sheet to the heavy cast-iron smokebox door. The outer shell, rolled from three-quarter-inch Bessemer mild steel plates, was stitched together with double-strap butt joints and three rows of staggered cherry-red rivets. Forward, above the pilot truck, twin level cylinders—twenty-two inches in width with a twenty-eight-inch stroke—gleamed with dark graphite lubricant, linked to the main crankpins through polished connecting rods as thick as an ox’s thigh.
Giles leaned over the wooden railing, inspecting the water-gauge sight glass mounted beside the backhead.
“Sight glass is showing two-thirds full of treated demineralized water,” Giles called down into the cab. “Borin, what’s your boiler draft gauge reading?”
Down on the steel footplate, Master Borin Bronze-Lung leaned out from the engineer’s cab window. The dwarf had discarded his leather smithing apron for a grease-stained canvas engineer’s cap. Even so, his face remained smudged with fine hard coal dust. He tapped a round brass Bourdon-tube pressure gauge with a blackened fingernail.
