1948 – The Chicago Railroad Fair “Wheels-A-Rolling” Pageant
“You there, you know your mark, don’t you?” 999 asked the engine facing the opposite direction on the other track. She’d just come off stage from her brief role in the pageant and the next engine, a stainless steel diesel-electric, was waiting for his cue.
“Yes, I know my mark,” Pioneer assured her. “Right before the end of the stage.”
“Just make sure you hit it exactly,” 999 told him. “There’s going to be a lot of people moving around before and after. Let’s have no mistakes to pull focus.” She had been next to last in the show, if you didn’t count all these cars and bicycles and horses. The last thing she wanted was this new upstart diesel messing up his entrance and upstaging her grand charge across the stage, a pale reduced recreation of her record breaking run that it was.
That he had been given the finale just for being the newest was a slight enough. At least they were making him go slowly. Speed record or not – and hers still beat his by half a mile per hour – he’d only done it the once. He wasn’t practiced at demonstrating his speed. He couldn’t be trusted to do more than glide across the stage and stop just short of the wing so his flat, slanted front end stayed in view and everyone could see how shiny he was.
“Not to worry, Miss,” Pioneer said. “I’ll do it right.”
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1963 – The Museum of Science and Industry
“You might have said you’d been the star in an entire movie!” 999 pouted.
“Imagine trying to impress the famous No. 999 with that,” Pioneer defended. “As if you would even have seen it.”
“No, you just let me go on like that to a seasoned show engine instead.” Worse than learning that Pioneer had extensive stage experience was knowing that he’d indulged her in the notion that he didn’t.
“You’re so famous, I was a little awed to be getting advice from ‘The Queen of Speed’,” Pioneer recalled. He graciously neglected to recall further that it was advice he hadn’t needed. “There’s not a lot of engines who can tell you something like that. And you’d already done so many more of those pageants than I had.”
“Humph.”
“It’s not exactly the same doing it live either. If you miss the mark on film, they let you do it over,” Pioneer went on. “In a live show, you do have to get it right in one try. So it wasn’t as if you were wrong to say so.”
999 stayed silent, but Pioneer thought she might be softening so he pressed on.
“It wasn’t even a very good movie from what I heard.”
“Yes, well…” 999 said, trailing to let him appreciate the gift of her forgiveness. “The important thing is we put on a perfect show. And you did hit that mark exactly.”