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CHAPTER 8

Steam Train


Shavgar

September 21, 1637

“The big difference between a steam train and a horse-drawn train,” Ivan Maslov said as he stood in the khan’s conference room, “is that the steam train doesn’t have to rest after galloping for a few minutes. You can, by changing gaits, keep a horse going for a couple of hours, but if you want it to pull a wagon, that’s about it. A steam train, even if it’s only going at the equivalent of a canter, say fifteen miles an hour, it can keep going at that speed for twenty-four hours a day, assuming you have light to see by. But even at ten hours a day, that’s still a hundred and fifty miles a day, and that’s four and a half days from Ufa to Alty-Kuduk. Which is about what they are managing now, and they’re going to get faster as more of the way is tracked.

“I want to keep one of the trains going back and forth on that route, moving guns, powder, canned and dried foods, and whatever else your army is going to need from Ufa to Alty-Kuduk, but I want the other one here.” He knew the speed of the trains because the straight-line distance from Alty-Kuduk was less than three hundred and fifty miles, which should put it in range of the Hero-class aircraft. As it was turning out, with the steam leakage, it was barely within range. Steam planes didn’t have as much range for a given weight of fuel as internal combustion. At least theirs didn’t, but that mattered less at the moment than the fact that the Nicky had made two trips to Alty-Kuduk since their arrival. The last had landed about an hour ago, so Ivan had very up-to-date information on the logistics train.

“We haven’t seen a lot of your mythical logistical support so far,” Aidar Karimov said testily. “Mostly just fuel for your aircraft.”

“That’s because so far we only have the one steamboat, and it’s not as fast as a train. It can carry a bit more and it uses less fuel to do it, but it takes it a couple of days each way to get from Alty-Kuduk to here and back. It should be arriving tomorrow with a load of AK4.7 chamber loading caplocks.”

Aidar Karimov snorted. The most irritating thing about the old bastard was that he was smart. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what Ivan was saying. He just didn’t approve of it.

Ivan had been thinking about those trains from when he was working on the logistics design back in Ufa. He remembered Tim’s use of the golay golrod, the walking walls in Rzhev. For that matter, the way Russians had been using the things for a long time before that. The Kazakhs had their own version, but they were wagons pulled by horses, sort of like what Bernie talked about in “Westerns,” but with heavy wooden walls strong enough to stop a bullet. That extra weight was hard on the horses. It wore them out and beat them down so that such armored wagon trains had to move slowly to conserve the horses. That, in turn, decreased their utility in terms of putting a fort where you wanted it and moving it as the strategic situation changed.

But with steam that restriction might disappear. With steam, if it worked, they might be able to actually move a wooden fort ten or even twenty miles in a day over basically flat terrain and that would really allow the strategic offense/tactical defense doctrine to work.

“Look, Sultan Karimov,” Ivan continued. “Even just the aircraft gives you a massive advantage against the Zunghars.”

“Again, I will believe it when I see it.” Aidar Karimov held up both hands in a “wait” gesture. “Yes, I do understand their utility, and I understand the need for fuel. But while they are very fast and I personally love to fly, their dependency on special fuel that needs to be shipped in from the Safavids is a real vulnerability. A raid on horseback to strike a fuel depot with flaming arrows and your airplanes are useless.”

“Not entirely,” said Vasilii. “Steam has several disadvantages compared to internal combustion, but it has three advantages that for us makes it much superior. It works at lower temperatures, so the materials don’t have to be quite as high tech. You don’t need to generate sparks because you’re using continual flame, and you can use anything that will burn—oil, alcohol, even charcoal or wood in theory. That makes them simpler and easier to build, but, more important in this case, means that we can, if need be, convert the plane to operate without oil. At least the steam planes. Not the smaller Scouts, with their internal combustion engines, but the Nicky and the other planes of the Polianitsa class.”

That was the first Ivan had heard about this. “How much of a loss of efficiency are you looking at if you make the conversion?”

“I have no idea. I’m pretty sure we’ll have enough steam to get into the air, but how long we’ll be able to stay up? That’s anyone’s guess until we make the conversions and try it.”

The khan coughed, and once he had their attention, he said, “Before Vasilii takes us all on an exploration of mechanical engineering, I think we need to address the issue of guns. Specifically, the AK4.7s that we were promised. And the chambers for them?”

“The first load is on the steamboat now, Salqam-Jangir Khan. It’s five hundred AKs, five thousand chambers and fifty thousand caps. There is also a lot of black powder and canned scrambled eggs.”

“Canned scrambled eggs?” Sultan Karimov asked.

“Yes, sir, and the council in Kazan have examined the factory and assure us that the canned eggs are halal. The eggs are beaten, seasoned, and injected into the containers, then cooked in the container and the container sealed to prevent spoilage. They’re good for at least a year if the containers aren’t opened.”

“Sounds disgusting,” Salqam-Jangir Khan said.

Ivan shrugged. “They will feed a man and can be eaten cold if needed.”

“That sounds worse,” Togym said.

“We’re also sending dried beans and freeze-dried vegetables. But they will be coming on later boats, as the harvest comes in and is processed.”

“And where is the rice that your rich landowners have promised us?” Sultan Karimov asked.

“That too is waiting on the harvest, and processing,” Salqam-Jangir Khan said. “We will wait for the next riverboat. And I approve General Maslov’s request to have the second train brought overland to us here as soon as it’s ready.”

The discussion continued as they worked out the logistics of the campaign. The real issue was the same as it was at the beginning of the discussion. It was simply going to take time to put all the parts in place, and none of them were sure that they would have the time.


Ufa

September 21, 1637

Bang! The wrench slipped off the nut and slammed into the pipe and was accompanied by a great deal of Russian cursing. The pipe was part of a two-cylinder steam engine. The cylinders were the better part of a foot wide and a yard long, and getting the valves to open and close just the right amount at just the right time was proving decidedly difficult. But once they did, this engine would produce an amazing amount of torque.

There were by now quite a lot of steam engines in Ufa. They were in factories and shops. There were two in the Kremlin and four in the Ufa Dacha. And they were, in many varieties, installed in riverboats that plied the Volga and its tributaries. There were even a couple of steam tractors pushing or pulling implements to help build the walls that were going to defend Ufa if Sheremetev’s forces were to attack.

However, a railroad engine was a different kettle of fish. It had to produce a lot of force. It had to produce it over a long time, and it had to do all that in a container that couldn’t be much wider than a standard wagon.

Making everything work and fit was proving to be a knuckle-scraping pain.

Alla Lyapunov listened to Vadim Ivanovich’s cursing with amusement before proclaiming, “How rude!”

Alla was playing hooky. Alla wasn’t the family geek, but as soon as they got back to Ufa, her “father” had stuck her in the Dacha school to “catch up with her education.” He’d pointed out that she’d spent the previous year as an undercook or scullery maid and needed to learn, well, everything.

Alla hadn’t ever been a particularly studious child. She could read and write, which was more than most people could, but in the Dacha that wasn’t considered nearly enough. At least one of her teachers had made her feel like an idiot every day since Vasilii and Miroslava had left on their mission to Shavgar. Right now she was supposed to be learning up-timer English. It was the new “language of scholarship,” so everyone told her. It was incredibly boring and the language made no sense at all. So she’d cut class and come here to watch them building the new locomotives.

A locomotive was the engine part of a train. She would have gone out to watch the workers building the tracks, but they were too far away by now. So rather than watching young men lifting heavy wooden beams into place and topping them with thin steel tape, she was watching an old fat guy twisted under a train locomotive trying to attach a pipe in a place where her new adoptive father should never have put the connection.

“What? Who’s that?”

“It’s me,” Alla said. “And I’m going to tell Vasilii you said that.”

“Tell him anything you want,” Vadim Ivanovich said as he wormed his way out of the innards of the steam locomotive. “But I suspect that what he’s going to care about is that you weren’t in class.”

Alla pouted. That was mean, but probably true. “It’s English!” she cried.

Vadim snorted a laugh. “I can’t argue with you about English. Silliest way of talking ever invented by man. ’Course I’m not a polymath like your papa.” He used the English word polymath. “Just an old smith turned mechanic. But if anyone has to repair the hydraulics on this monster in the field once we have the body on her, they are going to need a special tool.”

“Why does it need hydraulics in the first place?”

“Because the drive wheel weighs three hundred pounds and will have to be lifted when this thing isn’t traveling on its track.”

“When’s it going to be done?”

“Sooner than you think. This is the second one and we’d been working on models since before the move to Ufa.” Vadim was one of the “steamheads” from the original Dacha, the one located outside Moscow by the Gorchakov family just after Bernie Zeppi arrived from Grantville. “Steamboats were the first steam engines designed by the Dacha, but steam locomotives were the third. And the problem wasn’t the locomotive. It was the rails. It still is. Czar Mikhail and Togym Bey are spending a fortune putting in the rail line from Ufa to Alty-Kuduk.”

“Now you sound like my economics teacher,” Alla complained. Czar Mikhail was, according to at least one professor in the economics department, spending way too much money on things like the railroad, the airplanes, and so on. Alla had asked what he should be spending it on, and the professor had spent an hour explaining that he didn’t have the money and shouldn’t be spending it on anything. Partial reserves and gold-and-silver-backed paper money was fine, but he should have a larger reserve than he was keeping. It gave Alla a headache just thinking about it.

“Never mind. What’s sooner than I think?”

“Another three days and we’ll be ready for the high-pressure steam test. If that goes well, and it should, we’ll have the engine on the road in another two weeks.”

“So it’s going to be October before you’re ready to go.”

“For this train, yes. But we’ve ordered two more boilers from Murom.”

Alla shook her head. The Russian civil war was strange. Or maybe it wasn’t. But in spite of the fact that the United Sovereign States of Russia were at war with western Russia, which was controlled from Moscow, there was regular trade between the two. Canned caviar from the lower Volga was for sale in Moscow, and steam boilers from Murom, which was in the Muscovy-controlled part of Russia, were routinely transported to Ufa. For that matter, silk from China could be bought in Moscow cheaper after traveling through Ufa than you could get it traveling by sea. The war was going on and serfs were still escaping from Muscovite Russia to the Sovereign States, but trade went on. If there was a way to make money, someone would find it.


Siege lines outside Kazan

September 21, 1637

General Birkin sipped tea from China shipped through Ufa and looked out a double-paned window. The window unit was made in Kazan, the city he was besieging, from an idea brought back in time by the up-timers. And aside from the joy that he would be warm this winter, he didn’t think about it at all. What he thought about was the fact that he was going to have to wait for the winter to close in, because the summer campaign season was over. It ended about the same time that harvest season ended. Now they were into the fall wet season, when the world turned to mud before it turned to ice. And Birkin wasn’t quite ready to move yet.

By now the siege lines to the north of Kazan were a city in their own right. A walled city and a well-supplied one. Not an easy nut for General Lebedev to crack. General Birkin had a lively respect for Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev, but there was no way that he was going to call him “General Tim” like the broadsheets did. So if he couldn’t move his army around Lebedev, well, the same was true the other way. Lebedev couldn’t move his army around Birkin. The stalemate let both armies rest and refit. But the stalemate was all on the side of Czar Mikhail. The longer it lasted, the stronger the Sovereign States got and the weaker Moscow looked.

Birkin knew that and so did his boss in Moscow. And his boss, after the latest shake-up, was Ivan Romanov and it was looking like it was going to stay that way. Birkin shook his head. One way or the other, Russia was going to be ruled by a Romanov. Maybe even two. There was a faction in the Moscow Kremlin that wanted to make peace with the Sovereign States and let there be two Russias.

However, Ivan Romanov wasn’t part of that faction. Birkin had his orders, and as soon as the world froze, he would carry them out.

He went over to the desk and opened a panel, revealing a map of Perm, the city and the region. Perm was a new city. There’d already been a town there, but with the knowledge from the up-timers, the copper deposits in the area had been found and the new city of Perm was busy mining, smelting, and exporting copper ingots. Those ingots went down the Kama River to Kazan, where the copper was electrically purified, which produced small amounts of silver and gold, as well as very pure copper, just right for making wires and all sorts of modern products.

Not that Birkin cared all that much about Perm. Birkin cared about the Kama River. The Kama River, which joined the Volga, downriver of Kazan. Taking Perm would let him move down the ice-covered river and go all the way to Ufa, without Lebedev being in a position to stop him. It was a risky move, and one that Birkin had been convinced would fail until just a short while ago. Because, if he could move his army to Perm, General Lebedev could do the same. And probably faster.

General Birkin looked at the map and smiled. General Lebedev couldn’t move an army he didn’t have, and Czar Mikhail had borrowed the boy’s army to go rescue the Kazakhs. You just keep on moving your troops southeast, all the way out of the theater of operations, he thought happily.


In the air over Ufa

October 14, 1637

General Ivan Maslov sat in a seat in the passenger section of the Nicky. He’d been in Shavgar this morning when the radio message that the second steam train was ready reached them. Brandy had volunteered to bring him back so that he could see about setting up. It was raining, lowering visibility, which lowered their altitude. Brandy needed to be able to see the ground to navigate. They were following the rail line from Alty-Kuduk and while not flying at treetop level they were lower than Brandy liked to be. Sultan Aidar Karimov was in another seat and one of Vladimir’s scouts was acting as Brandy’s navigator and Vasilii was acting as the aircraft engineer. Vladimir was still in Shavgar.

Brandy put the plane in a ten-degree bank and circled Ufa as she lined up on the Ufa River to land. The landing was smooth and they pulled up onto the shore, cut the steam to the engines and the fans that inflated the ACLG, and settled gently onto the Nicky’s accustomed spot.

General Maslov stood and moved to stand on the lower wing. He didn’t wait for the stairs to be placed. It was only a four-foot drop, so he jumped down and his shiny black boots sank to the ankle in the muddy ground. Ivan was off-balance and landed on his face in the mud.

One of the flight crew sloshed over to help him stand up, but he was covered in cold, wet, and exceedingly embarrassing mud.

He looked back to see Sultan Karimov grinning. “It’s often best to wait before jumping, General Maslov.”

“Yes,” Ivan said as he used a dirty kerchief to wipe his face.

“It’s been raining off and on for four days, General,” said the aircraft maintenance worker.

“So I gathered,” Ivan agreed. “A little too late.”

✧ ✧ ✧

Three hours later, in a different uniform, Ivan walked around the steam locomotive. It wasn’t a copy of one of the early trains built in the first half of the nineteenth century, nor of one of the last steam trains built in the first half of the twentieth century. It was a compromise between the two, but not something like they would have built in the 1880s either. This was a new design based on what they’d learned up through the twentieth century, but using the materials they could produce in the here and now. The tube boiler was good steel, but not one of the up-time computer-designed alloys that were used on the space shuttle or whatever. It was just your good, solid, medium carbon steel, strong enough and heat resistant enough to work at the few hundred degrees that this train would operate at.

It was also heavy. The engine weighed the better part of twenty tons. And after his experience earlier, Ivan realized that his plan to use this locomotive pulling a train directly to Shavgar and from there to points east wouldn’t work, at least not during the rainy season. Ivan looked from the train to the railroad track. This too was different from pictures of steel rails he’d seen. The rail itself was at least three times as wide as a steel rail would have been, with a curved steel cap that covered the top and some of the sides of the curved wooden rail. The rail was curved so that a cart or wagon could climb over it with relative ease. Surrounding the rail was a tarmac road. The weight of the train was carried on the rail wheels. The outer wheels were there for balance only, as long as the rail was in use. It was only after the train left the railroad that the outer wheels would actually carry a load.

That was what the rail was for, to support the weight on a smooth surface. The weight was supported by the rail and bumps in the road were for the most part eliminated. That was why the steel caps on the rails extended between one section of rail and the next. With ninety percent of the weight of the train on the rail, friction was drastically decreased and the top speed was drastically increased. That was also the reason for the tarmac surface supporting the wheels that took the other ten percent of the train’s weight.

Once the ground froze, it would take the weight, but not until then. For that matter, the train wouldn’t be able to travel on the stretches of the Ufa–Alty-Kuduk line where the rails weren’t in place yet. Of course, even after the ground froze the rough terrain would keep the speed of the train low, preventing the incredibly high speeds that the steel-topped rail and the tarmac allowed.

Ivan didn’t curse. Sultan Karimov was here, and he was embarrassed enough. At least here in the engine house, the weight of the massive locomotive was supported by the steel-topped wood rail. The power wheel and support wheel were both lowered, so the weight of the massive locomotive was well supported.

“Would you like to go for a ride?”

Ivan lifted an eyebrow. “Is there enough track?”

“Sure, General. The crews are adding a mile a day. There’s a factory just out of town that makes the rails, steams the wood, straightens it, cuts it, soaks it in tar, and attaches the steel strips and the supports. All the workmen at the railhead have to do is flatten the land, lay the gravel, put in the rail, and cover the gravel with tar. It’s still a lot of work, but they are pushing the line out.”

They climbed aboard, and Vadim Ivanovich showed them around the cabin. He showed them the steam gauges and the controls, then they pulled out and the train followed the track to the bridge over the Ufa River at a sedate speed of about eight miles per hour. Once they were over the bridge, Vadim blew the steam whistle and opened her up. They hit forty miles an hour, then fifty before they started slowing down. The Nicky was faster, but the Nicky flew at a thousand feet or more over the land. It felt slow. This felt fast. Terrifyingly fast. But Vadim was grinning like a loon the whole distance to the railhead.

If this had been an up-time train that traveled on two tracks and didn’t have other wheels, they would have had to pull onto a siding, or go backwards to get back to Ufa. But it wasn’t. When they got to within a quarter mile of the railhead, they stopped. Vadim pulled a lever and a hydraulic system lifted the guide wheel and the power wheel, leaving them in a large, heavy steam car. They pulled off the rail onto a temporary platform, where they turned around and stopped.

“Come look at the work crews,” Vadim said.

It was still raining. Not hard, but the sort that soaked into the ground and caused plants to grow with profusion. In spite of the rain, there were fresno scrapers piling up earth, smoothing out the top, and covering that with gravel, using heavy rollers to compress the earth, then covering that gravel with finer gravel. And for right now that was all they were doing. The rest would wait till the rain stopped and the subgrade, the subbase, and the base had a chance to dry. Once that happened, they would add a layer of tar. Then another layer of fine gravel. Then another team would pull a rail section from a train car and carry it to the railhead, where they would place it on the gravel, making sure that it was straight and even. Then more gravel would be pushed over it so that only the rounded top of the rail stuck up above the roadbed. Then onto the next section. The foreman told them that they wouldn’t add the tar until the rain had stopped and the bed had had a chance to dry a little. What they would have at the end of the process was a tarmac road.

“This is a raised road,” Sultan Karimov said. “It’s a good two feet above the land around it, and you’re pulling that earth from the ground right around the road.” He pointed at the wide, shallow ditches on either side of the road. “The water’s going to build up on the uphill side of your road and sweep it away.”

“We’ve thought of that. We’ve surveyed the route carefully, and we’re installing culverts under the road as needed to let the water flow under the road without damaging it. It will also let the roadbed drain and, once the tarmac is on, it should stay dry.”

Sultan Karimov nodded thoughtfully. “I almost wish this rail line was going through our lands.”

“In spite of the gold mine?” Ivan asked.

“Yes, in spite of the gold mine.” The gold mine in their clan lands had been discovered while the rail line had been being surveyed and had led to quite a bit of trouble. But it was operational now and Karimov’s clan was shipping gold to Ufa, and had a solid account in the Sovereign States central bank. Which was the other reason that Karimov was here. He wanted to see for himself just how spendable that money was.

Finally, they finished the sightseeing tour and got back on the locomotive. The locomotive pulled back onto the track, and away they went, steaming back to Ufa, satisfied with what they’d learned.


New Ruzuka Steel Works, Ufa

October 15, 1637

Stefan looked up as the sultan walked in, escorted by Izabella Utkin. He recognized the sultan by his outfit, but wasn’t sure if he’d ever met the man before.

“This is Sultan Aidar Karimov,” Izabella said. “You know, the clan with the gold mine.”

“Yes, what can I do for you, Sultan Karimov?” Stefan walked around his desk and held his hand out.

The sultan looked at the outstretched hand, and after a moment, took it. “I wish to buy AK4.7 caplock rifles.”

By now the steel works, mostly at the urging of Izabella, had expanded. Not so much by building more businesses as by buying them, or entering into partnerships with them. The barrels for the AKs were made in Kazan. Stefan still had the assembly line for the chambers and the chamber clips, and the caps were made by a chemical plant that was located six miles up the Ufa River. The chamber locks, stocks and assembly were done in Ufa. They sold the finished rifles in both Ufa and Kazan.

They arranged to sell three hundred fifty AK4.7s for seven rubles each, with each ruble being roughly equivalent to eighty USE dollars, at least according to the United Sovereign States of Russia bank in Ufa. The exchanges in Grantville and Magdeburg had rubles worth rather less than that.

Overall, the sultan was pleased, or at least that was Stefan’s impression.

In fact, Sultan Aidar Karimov was pleased, sort of, in a way. Partly because the price was fair, even perhaps a bit generous. Certainly less than he’d be paying a gunsmith to build the rifles individually. But more than that, he was pleased by the ready way that the merchants in Ufa were willing to take his check on the bank of the Sovereign States. No fuss, no discount required, nothing. And it wasn’t just here. All the merchants in Ufa were happy to take a check as soon as he pulled out his bank book, which had an image of his face on the first page. People were happy to take his check. And he was getting better prices for cloth than he would have in Shavgar.

Yes, everything the Russians claimed about their money seemed to be true, or at least the merchants here believed it. And their manufacturing capability was even greater than advertised.

And that was utterly terrifying.

Laying track a mile a day, and that was just one team, the rail-laying team out of Ufa. There were other teams, one moving north from Alty-Kuduk, and Togym had several teams working. They probably weren’t matching the Ufa team. They didn’t have Ufa’s support, but they would be doing at least a quarter mile a day, and there were several teams.

Once the rail line was in, Togym would be selling beef and mutton in Ufa and Moscow and everywhere on the Volga, and getting top dollar in good money. Aidar looked at the bank book in his hand. Money as good as, or better than, gold.


Steam train leaving Ufa

October 16, 1637

The Nicky would be halfway to Shavgar by now, Sultan Aidar Karimov thought as he boarded the train. He was accompanying the rifles back to his clan. He settled into the seat in the one passenger car of the eight-car train and felt the jerk as it started on its trip. He’d be to the railhead in less than an hour, but after that, packing the rifles to his clan lands would take a week. Horsemen were no longer the fastest men on Earth, and his way of life was going to die.


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