A block signal had no eyes, yet its glass lenses carried a color code that could lie in three different wavelengths.
Marcus Cole hauled back on the independent air-brake handle, venting forty pounds of brake-pipe reduction with a sharp, pneumatic CHUFF. The four-car Budd R-Zero consist lurched to a halt on the concrete apron of Junction 96. Its steel wheels stopped thirty feet from the edge of the circular abyss. The air was heavy with the stench of scorched asbestos brake shoes, stagnant harbor bilge, and the high, stinging tang of ozone.
Ahead of the train, the subterranean cavern expanded into an enormous rock-cut amphitheater blasted out of black Manhattan schist. The walls were damp and wept black water from mineral fissures forty feet below the riverbed. Rusted cast-iron arch ribs reinforced the vault, dating back to the earliest municipal excavations of the 1890s.
In the center of the cavern sat the Three-Way Turntable Pit.
It was a sixty-foot circular excavation, flooded with five feet of stagnant, oily black harbor water that churned with a slow counter-clockwise eddy. Resting in the center of the flooded pit on a massive central pivot bearing was a rotating steel truss bridge. It was just long enough to support a single four-car consist. The turntable deck was currently locked into alignment with the incoming mainline iron. On the far side of the pit, the rails split into three distinct tunnel mouths carved into the bedrock like open throats.
