Dear Pilot,
Please tell your Goddesses I enjoyed their story very much. We shovelnoses didn’t really get to see each other much, but I suspect Pegasus probably was quite tactful if she could defuse an argument like that so easily. There’s always some mudslinging in the yard, but it slides right off stainless steel in my experience. I think your Goddesses’ loyalty to her despite her necessary absence is quite admirable too. We should all be so lucky to have trains like that.
The Rocket has his defenders as well, though I’m not sure he realizes. Word is, someone from his gallery heard about what the steam engines said and that someone made sure that it’d be heard out here that The Rocket runs and our steam engines don’t so his wheels have probably turned more times than both of theirs combined at this point.
As for retiring in good condition, I actually still run too. Not my wheels, of course, but they run my engine for a few minutes once a week to keep everything primed. I’d need a little… spring cleaning first, but mechanically, if the need arose I could go right back into revenue service tomorrow. U-505 also still runs and he’s much louder about it! Obviously he couldn’t go back to work, but they put all that effort into getting his parts replaced, it only makes sense to keep them operational. People come to study him sometimes so it’s important that he can actually demonstrate his mechanics for them.
It turns out that U-505 has a poem too. One of his guides heard about the part in your letter about poems and brought the book Captain Gallery wrote about him to read U-505’s poem to us. He was quite modest about it and said he didn’t recall having a poem. I think I would remember if someone wrote me a poem, but then again, he was very new and being sent off to war so I suppose it could slip his mind.
It was written for him on his commissioning day by all the visiting officers from his sibling ships, verse by verse, sort of like a little song. It tells a story about ten British ships and each new line added would be about U-505 sinking one. He started getting bashful about it nearer the end and interrupted to say that most of the ships he sunk weren’t British at all, that the poem really wasn’t really accurate to his history and was just meant to wish him well. We actually never got to hear the end, now that I think of it, because we got off on a tangent about how it wasn’t really so important if it was accurate since it was them guessing about the future when 2903 snorted really loudly and said, “Big deal, everyone’s got a poem.”
Well, I’m sure if you had a poem, you’d have mentioned it. Certainly I don’t have one and I said as much. I asked 999 if she had a poem then. “Not to my knowledge,” she said.
I guess 2903 thought most of us preserved engines get a poem written about them at some point… because someone wrote a poem about him too! He says it wasn’t very long – four lines or so – but it was published in the newspaper. Someone saw him on a drive during his move and wrote a little bit about how he used to run fast but now he was inching to the MSI.
He didn’t really like his poem because it called him old; something about being from “a bygone day”. He’s the youngest of us in the yard and he would have only been 18 then so I could see how he would take offense. Still, not every engine gets a poem written about him. I think he has a new appreciation, knowing that neither of us “famous engines” has one (and I think U-505 was grateful for the distraction from his anyway.) I hope your 2050 is enjoying her new poems much more.
I asked about how many people the counter says there are now, but my guide says the counter goes so fast that as soon as she would have checked, the number would be much bigger by the time she got back out here to tell me. People are born very frequently these days which is actually part of the point of the counter. Seeing the number go up so fast is to make the number hard to conceive, just how you experienced it.
I am glad to hear that the population at your museum is growing too and that so many of you are also being kept in running condition as well. Please give my warm regards to 2050 and well wishes to Shay in her overhaul. And you! Hopefully your “peskiness” can be sorted out and you can help keep your rails busy in Shay’s absence.
Your friend,
Pioneer