The heavy-duty district of Grey Crag didn’t sleep. It operated on three eight-hour shift cycles governed by the steam siren atop the Citadel Keep.
For ten days and ten nights. Meanwhile, the track gangs pushed the southern mainline through the shattered breach of Granite Gap, a second army of three hundred mechanics, pipefitters, and masons worked within the city basin to complete the ten-mile Inner Industrial Rail Loop.
The loop was the supply heart of the settlement.
Starting at the deep water-dock on the Grey River, the dual standard-gauge tracks curved southward past the lime kilns and the timber sawmills, climbed a gentle one-point-five percent grade to the Bessemer steel converters, looped behind the granite quarries. Then it circled the newly reclaimed agricultural bottomlands before returning to the central freight classification yard.
Giles Croft stood on the raised timber walkway of the dispatch tower. His folding rule was tucked into his waistcoat. He watched the morning traffic.
Down on the siding, a small, four-wheeled switching engine—assembled from spare boiler plates and a sixteen-horsepower stationary mill engine—shunted a cut of six wooden gondolas loaded with iron ore directly into the converter charging ramp.
Across the yard, forty laborers unloaded cured white oak ties from the creosote steam-cleaner without a single horse or wagon blocking the thoroughfare.
