Roadwolf's Blog

This article, originally printed in the December 1994 edition of National Geographic, caught my eye, and my heart ever since I laid eyes on it.  Having always been a fan of trains, this article gave me a much deeper understanding of their role in society – and of their role in keeping countries together.  I have been wanting to re-type the whole article here on my blog, as it has been such an inspiration to myself.  I have however been worried about copyrights and such.  That being said, I finally decided to type it up.  If I receive a request to remove it, I shall.  However at the moment, I am claiming its use for educational enlightenment.

CANADA’S HIGHWAY OF STEEL

By MICHAEL PARFIT

Bill Bell, the locomotive engineer on the Canadian Pacific Extra 3091 train, out of Regina, Saskatchewan, is whistling “Moon River.”  This shows he’s feeling cranky.  “Always whistle ‘Moon River,’” he told me once.  “Calms you right down.”

He has good reason to need calming.  Right out of the yard, as the train started southeast down the branch line known as the Tyvan Subdivision, his second engine overheated, rang the alarm bell for five minutes, then expired for the day.  “I hate using one unit,” he said.  “No pizzazz.”  Then his breakman, who was inexperienced, nearly jammed a switch.  Now, on our way home, pulling loaded grain cars, he has the throttle all the way to position eight, but though the engine roars and sways, we can barely manage 21 miles an hour.  “Now we suffer,” he says.

I’m not suffering.  North American commerce doesn’t get much more basic then trains and grain.  And here I am, in a big old locomotive, hauling grain west across the plains of Saskatchewan, one of the great wheat producing regions of the world.  And this train is part of the most romantic and legendary of North American railroads: the Canadian Pacific, the steel spine of Canada.

“No one who has not lived in the west since the Old-Times can realize what is due to that road – the C.P.R.,” wrote Father Albert Lacombe, a missionary who helped pacify Indians while it was being built.  “It was Magic – like the mirage on the prairies, changing the face of the whole country.”  So I’m here listening for the echoes of that old magic – to watch the grain move from the prairie to the sea, to feel the thunder of engines and the roll of steel wheels under my feet, and to understand the strength and the trouble in a very old partnership between farmers and railroaders that’s as undervalued, yet as fundamental to North American life and business, as the bread we eat.

“This is rated some of the best farm dirt in America,” Bill Bell says.  He’s stopped whistling.  He must be feeling calmer.  He is the good host telling me about the landscape he has worked in for 21 years.  “There’s that Saskatchewan gumbo,” he said, pointing at dried mud beside the rails.  “It looks hard as cement, but if you throw a seed on it – bluiee!“

The train rocks along the Tyvan Sub.  The cab is a small room with a power-control console on the right and seats for conductor and break-man on the left.   The engine roars and whines, wheels screech on curves, and there’s a spit and hiss of pressurized air.  In the lowering sunlight the ties are in shadow, but the wheel-polished rails catch the sun like water and seem to float out ahead of us, free of the ground.

“The Lord said, ‘Let there be Wheat,’” the humorist Stephen Leacock once wrote, “and Saskatchewan was born.”  Sun, rain, dirt, and farmers here produce 55 percent of all wheat planted in Canada – an average of about 16 million tons a year: 30 tons a minute.  Much of this is exported – with an increasing tonnage going to the United States.  But since the U.S. also produces wheat, this set off heated dispute between the two countries over trade limits and subsidies.  That battle is a microcosm of the volatile and contentious world grain market, in which virtually every wheat producing country – including Saudi Arabia, which farms grain at incredible expense – uses massive subsidies to lower the price it charges overseas.

Against this backdrop of vast cargoes and international disputes, the area of the Tyvan Sub looks fairly simple: fields of wheat still green, fields of yellow canola or mustard, a straight dirt road every mile.  In the charmed warmth of the late afternoon sub, the circle of life through which we move seems welcomingly small.  Maybe it’s because we can’t see far around the curve of the earth.  As we rumble along in our train from town to town, this landscape that has no edges is nevertheless close and intimate.  Wind blows in silver waves across the grain and washes up against groves of trees around storage bins and old farm houses, and it seems that this land of wheat and farmers has been here for all time.

“Fifty-Seven Fourteen, two cars back to a bump.”  The conductor is calling out instructions from behind the train.  Bill Bell eases off the throttle.  There’s a slight shudder of a connection, then he gives it a notch of power to pull forward.  Another car – another hundred tons of grain – has joined the train.

As we get moving again, Bell reflects on the land and its people.  “Family names out here are Ells, Fhalman, Shinders,” he says.  “Most of them are in the fourth generation.  They’re snap-crackle good farmers here.”

Bell’s family name belongs here just as surely as these.  His grandfather, son of a railroad man in England, came here as a young man and worked on steam engines for the CPR.  Bell’s father worked on the railroad for 42 years.  From the age of six Bell himself went out Saturdays with his father in the steam locomotives,  up and down some of these same lines.  His father would put a can of beans up on the boiler, they’d cook hot dogs in the firebox, and they’d haul grain.

The dream that made this world of grain was a dream of rails.  Grain is the railroad’s biggest single commodity, but the farmers couldn’t have reached the prairie without the railroad, and then, without the railroad, there would have been no way to market the abundant grain the prairie can produce.

The idea itself – of a railroad from coast to coast – is older then Canada, but it began to take shape just after nationhood in 1867.  Soon it became the single most important thread in the fabric of Canadian identity.

“Every nation rejoices in at least one epic moment from its past, as much myth as history,” wrote Pierre Berton, author of two best-selling books on the CPR, “the Spanish Armada, the storming of the Bastille, the Boston Tea Party, the Long March, the Voortrek.  Ours in unique, less violent but equally dramatic: the construction of a line of steel to unknown shores to create a nation.”

The story of the CPR is almost as frequently told to Canadians as the legend of King Arthur is told to Britons: A grandiose dream born long before Canada became a nation, a series of backroom political intrigues, a web of desperate financial maneuvers, and an ordeal of construction across ancient granite, endless prairie, and walls of rock, carried to triumph in 1885 by a young general manager named William C. Van Horne.  The final spike – made of iron, not gold, since Van Horne did not like elaborate ceremony – was driven 27 miles west of Revelstoke, British Columbia, on November 7, 1885.

“All I can say,” Van Horne remarked when asked to speak that day, “is that the work has been well done in every way.”  He had been similarly terse in a speech the previous month: “We were under the inspiration of a national idea, and went forward.”

Before I rode the train, I flew my small Cessna over the route of the main line from Vancouver to Regina.  The farm fields lay, vast and widespread, across mile after mile of prairie; if I were to climb to the edge of space, I would have only seen more.  But the rail was almost invisible from as low as a thousand feet.  Compared with all the things the rails made possible – the cities, the reservoirs, the highways, and the great grid of farmland – the track seemed utterly insignificant.  The scratch it drew across the landscape looked like a faint line on a big bold canvas, just a sketch drawn by a pencil among much brighter things.

But that pencil drew Canada. This insignificant line made Winnipeg king, and Regina queen, led the stampede to Calgary, carried climbers to the Selkirks, founded industrial trade on Lake Superior, made fortunes in Vancouver, and brought the checkerboard to the prairie.  Its link with grain is not just a handclasp; it is a weld.

On the Tyvan Sub, our stops prove the link, and give me a hint of trouble.  Bill Bell brings the train to each little town along the track – Heward, Creelman, Fillmore.  The towns are tight low clusters of white clapboard houses nestled in trees, each with a wide dirt Main Street, a few false-front businesses, a ball park, and curling and hockey rinks.  At each we pause, either to drop empty cars or pick up full ones.  At each stop one or more grain elevators tower over the train and over the whole prairie: The plain white or steel sides of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool or United Grain Growers elevators or the wonderfully gaudy, orange-and-yellow elevators of the Pioneer Grain Company.

In every prairie town the elevator has always been the symbol of commercial success.  But when we get to Heward, there is no elevator.  The last of three was shut down in 1985.  And as we lumber northwest past the next town’s single Saskatchewan Wheat Pool elevator.  Bell stares out the window with a knowing melancholy on his face.

“Poor old Creelman,” he says.  “There’s a town that’s sinking into the sunset.”

I know.  I’m fond of Creelman.  As well as riding the rails here, I’ve been up and down the highway that parallels this stretch several times, trying to get to know this piece of the railroad.  I’ve been to the annual Sports Day in Fillmore, where the curling rink was full of baseball players eating steak.  I’ve sat in Nicolina’s Cafe in Creelman with May Allan, and Thelma Becksteed, talking about old Charlie Loucks, who used to run the barbershop and pool hall next door.  May, who dropped by Nicolina’s to pick up five tapes from the movie co-op, is the town secretary.  Thelma called herself “just an old farmer.”

“If a lady went in there,” Thelma said, nodding in the direction of the pool hall, “Charlie’d cut her hair, but he wouldn’t let a lady play pool.”

Charlie died in 1985, and the pool hall has been closed since.  That’s how it is all along the Tyvan Sub.  There isn’t a single business left in Heward, and Creelman is down to the cafe and a general store, where once there were two groceries, service stations, and implement dealers.  The town has been consolidated with Fillmore’s, though Creelman students picketed the district school board.

“Creelman’s changed terrible much,” Thelma said.

What’s happening here?  Mostly it’s low grain prices, increased farming efficiency, and the high cost of equipment; you have to have a bigger farm to survive, and bigger farms mean fewer people per square mile.

“Fifty years ago there was a family with eight children living on every quarter section,” Eliford Mott, a Creelman farmer, told me.  (A quarter section is 160 acres.)  “Fifteen years ago my father, uncle and I made a living off of 11 quarters.  Now those same 11 quarters will support only one family.”

We sat at the dining-room table in his house in Creelman while his son, Josh, put graduation gift thank-you notes in blue envelopes.  They were like good-bye letters; Josh wasn’t likely to live here again.  He was going to Saskatoon to study auto-body repair.

“There’s not enough people here driving cars and having accidents,” his father said, “to make an auto-body shop viable.”

Josh can’t come back to the farm either.  His parents are too young to give it up.

Bill Bell is succinct about it.  “With only income for one on the farm now,” he says, “the others need to get gone.”

At the Creelman crossing, Bell blows the whistle: Long, long, short, long.  There are no cars to warn.  We rumble slowly out of town.

The partnership between rail and farm is a conspiracy to attack distance.  To each community the prairie may be intimate, but its dominant characteristic is expanse.  From Winnipeg on the east to Calgary on the west is 839 rail miles; the whole Canadian prairie covers 275,000 square miles.  Distance itself is the enemy here; the train must conquer it to make the system work.

A few days after riding with Bill Bell, I catch CP Extra 5741 West at Moose Jaw, a big town with a railroad yard right through the middle of it, about 130 miles west of Heward, Creelman, and Fillmore.  Grain cars from places like the Tyvan Sub are gathered in the yard, assembled behind four or five engines, and sent west across the miles.

I stand waiting for a train on the edge of the yard.  The air is full of pressurized air, and the squeak of steel wheels on rail.  This yard is huge;  15 sets of rails, which all seem full of cars; but the size of the operation it represents is amazing: I imagine the grain like a river, threshed off the fields and flowing to the elevators, pouring in a golden cascade down dozens of branch lines to gather at other yards like this in Regina, Swift Current, Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, or Calgary.  There it becomes a Mississippi of grain, tolling down the long, thin pencil line to the coast.

On engine 5741, the machine that drives all this enterprise, Duane Weekes eases the throttle back.  The engines awake from a purr to a growl.  This is called lifting the train, a feat of raw power.  The speedometer climbs slowly to 0.5 mile an hour.  We feel gentle thumps as the slack – spaces in the couplings between each car, which can add as much as 3 percent to the length of the train – stretches out down today’s 5,000 feet – 78 cars and 8,481 tons of grain.

“Amy? Hello Amy? Have you had your supper, Amy?” Duane holds his cellular phone hard to his right ear, talking to his four-year-old daughter in Moose Jaw.  The throttle’s in p osition eight and we’re 30 miles west of town, roaring and rattling along at almost 50mph.

“We’re away from home for 3,800 miles a month,” Duane says after hanging up.  “We miss a lot of Kodak Moments with our kids.  I’m paid really well for the time I’m away from home, but I earn every penny of that.  You never get that time back.”

The cellular phone is evidence of changes in railroading.

“Used to get to the end of the road, and the guys would go to the pub for the night,” one engineer told me.   “In the morning they’d throw the conductor in the caboose to sober up and drive the train home.  That doesn’t go on anymore.”  Crew jobs have been replaced by automation: Where once a crew of five took a freight train across the rails, often there is only the engineer and a conductor.  The caboose has been replaced by an automatic sensor on the last car, known as a rear end device or, for unprintable reasons, a “Fred.”  And the pub has been replaced by the golf course.  “Nice day for nine,” I once heard over the train’s radio, and on another train an engineer spent a couple of minutes on the radio setting up a foursome.  Every crew book-in office has flyers for golf tournaments posted on the wall.

One thing hasn’t changed from the very beginning though: Railroading’s hard on the family.  You are subject to call at almost any hour, and freight trains run on only one schedule: Probably Late.

“Your wife always asks the same questions,” Duane says. ” ‘When are you going to go to work, and when are you coming back?’ We never have the answers.”  He opens a small refrigerator in the cab and drinks one of two dozen bottles of water provided by the CPR, which the crews call “rail ale.”

“We have a lot of good ideas on how to make this railroad work,” he says. He’s also a union representative. “But on a lot of issues the company and the government don’t consult with us.  They tell us we don’t see the big picture. We are the big picture. Railroading is getting the train from here to there as quickly as possible.  We know how to do that.”

Maybe someone should be listening; things are not working well right now. A few miles later familiar alarm bells sound: Another engine problem. This time the number four locomotive is overheating. The conductor, Grant Vierling, opens the engine’s access doors to try to cool it, and we rumble on.

This railroad is having power problems. Its diesel-electric engines, which the crews call “the power,” are struggling. Almost every time we encounter another train, I see access doors open on one or more units. Almost every train I’ve ridden has lost an engine while I’ve been aboard. About a week ago, coming into Medicine Hat on a train pulled by two units, we lost both engines about four miles out.  The engineer decided to coast in; it was all downhill, but his breaks were limited.  I will not soon forget coming into Medicine Hat yard at a very fast 15 mph, unable to see more then a hundred feet around a curve of grain cars ahead, with the conductor standing beside me saying: “This is hairy.” The engineer brought the train to a smooth stop right in front of the craft and antique shop that occupies part of the station.  He smiles. “That,” he said, “is fuel efficiency.”

Engineers are getting used to this sort of thing. They accuse management of cutting back maintenance in a shortsighted attempt to save money.  Management responds that increased buisness has forced the company to use all available engines, and new units are on order.

But the power problems are symptomatic.  Both the CPR and the Canadian National, its government-owned half sister, are running as hot and stressed as the power.  Both have emerged from lean years to see dramatic increases in business and profit, part of a North American railroad renaissance that has some executives talking about a “new golden age.”  Yet the CPR, which owns lines reaching to lucrative U.S. markets, claims that unions, taxes, and regulation make it hard to compete with U.S. carriers, and it lobbies provincial and national governments for change. But by the close nature of its partnership with the farmers, and move to change operations has its effect on the prairie.

One of those decisions – to make it easier to close less profitable lines – could eventually kill the Tyvan Sub.  It’s easier and cheaper to fill a whole train at one time than pick it up in bits and pieces, as Bill Bell did.  To encourage this efficiency, the CPR offers discounts for grain trucked to “high throughput” elevators that can handle 50 or more cars at a time.  For Terry Hanson, another farmer at Creelman, the discount makes it almost three dollars a ton cheaper to have his wheat trucked about 30 miles to Weyburn then three miles to the Fillmore elevator.  The problem is that is more farmers are attracted to the Weyburn elevator, the railroad could justify killing the Tyvan Sub.  Not long ago Bill Bell presided over the final moments of such a line.  When he picked up carloads of old rails that had been pried up from the track, a group of farmers stood there with signs that said things like “Good-bye to our line.”

“Will you truck it to Weyburn?” I asked Terry Hanson.

“No!” he said.  “There’s a principle there.  I want to maintain my services on this line.  It’s only cheaper as long as this line exists to compete.”

Ironically, as the railroad is pushing high quantity loading, the farmers are going in the opposite direction.  They’re cutting their big wheat fields into smaller chunks, diversifying into specialty crops like lentils, spices, peas, or canary seed because these crops offer higher prices per acre.

The general push for what appears to be the efficiency of consolidation is widespread across Canada.  It is labeled with a curious word, which has different meanings in other places.  The word for making the kind of decisions that kill towns like Fillmore, Creelman and Heward is “rationalization.”

The train passes a small rail-side building, and a couple of minutes later an authoritative male voice comes on the radio, talking to us: “CP detector, mile 49.5, Swift Current Sub,” the voice says. “Total axles 341. No alarms.”

It’s a computerized scanner, which can detect overheated breaks or other potential disasters.  But the automated voice sounds so human that crews sometimes have persuaded new employees to throw bottles of rail ale out on the embankment beside the scanner for that poor thirsty guy in the hut.

We reach Swift Current at 10 p.m. A ballpark is lighted brightly against the day’s last twilight.  Duane and Grant leave the train.  They’ll wait here for a few hours, then drive an eastbound home to Moose Jaw.  I stay with the westbound train, and two Pauls get on: Paul Hickson is the new engineer, and Paul Taylor is the conductor.

By midnight, darkness is complete.  Small towns pass quietly: a light on an elevator, a closed cafe.  They make almost no disturbance in the deepening lake of prairie night.

At about two in the morning the CP Extra 5741 meets an eastbound carrying containers, cars and lumber.  “That’s a hot one,” Paul Taylor says.  He’s not talking about the power problems this time; he means that to compete with truck lines the railroad must move these cargoes faster than grain.  We roll slowly into a siding to wait for the other train.  Paul Hickson and I go out on the engine’s walkway.

“If you look up there and a little away from it,” Hickson says, “you can see Andromeda.”

The engines murmur in idle. In the distance a sodium-vapor lamp high on a Pioneer elevator at Carmichael glows against orange paint.  Farther away a beacon flashes on a tower.  There’s a farm light to the northeast, and, beyond it, flickers glow up from a storm below the horizon.  There’s a smell of cut hay and diesel smoke.

In the silence I think of two more things about the prairie.  Pierre Berton described the first days of the coming of the line to the young towns: “The sharp, spring air was pungent with the incense of fresh lumber and ringing with the clamor of construction … lasting friendships were forged among soiled tents on the river bank … every man was young and strong and in love with life.”

And I remember sitting around a dining room table near Creelman with Dennis Smith and his family.  At the table were his wife, Judy, and his pretty young daughters: Janelle – at 15 all braced and blushy – and Amber, 13, who was still on the happy, sharp edge of childhood.  The family was neither bitter not resigned; they seemed to share a kind of resolve common in families who survive on the prairie for generation after generation, adapting, as Wallace Stegner has written, “to the terms the land sets.”  We talked about Creelman’s small post office.  Hours have been cut, but the government has promised it won’t be closed.

“So it’ll be there for a little while yet,” Judy said.

Amber sneaked a wicked grin at me. “Like everything else,” she said. “A little while.”

On CP Extra 5741 I hear the whistle of the oncoming train.  The lead engine rounds a bend a mile away, and the broad beam of its headlight hits Paul Taylor, who’s standing down on the grass to check the train as it passes.  Weird shadows shift and jiggle as the light moves.  Paul’s shadow dances wildly, and in the shadows in the long grass I cannot tell light from wind; it looks as if the dazzle of the CPR itself is blowing the prarie grass before it.

The locomotives roar past.  The doors are open on the second unit.

I’ve been on the prarie so long that when I see a cloud with darkness under it west of Calgary, I think it’s the shadow of heavy rain.  But it’s a mountain.  Suddenly we are going up long grades between walls of forest and sedimentary stone.  Both the scene and the railroad have changed.

For the farmers and the grain the mountains of the Canadian West are just more distance to conquer.  By the time the grain gets here, all the gathering is done, and it’s time for the long haul.  All that stands between it and the sea are two walls of rock – The Rocky Mountains and the Selkirk range – the canyons of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers, and the toughest 125 mile stretch of track on this railroad: the notorious Mountain Sub.

We Climb slowly out of Calgary along the Bow River between groves of cottonwoods, passing an entire town where no one lives at all: a set for the television series Lonesome Dove.  Entertainment rather then wheat sustained the railroad through here for years: CPR opened the northern Rockies to tourism and made Banff and Lake Louise famous worldwide.  There are no more CPR passenger trains; that’s all over now.  We creep upgrade through Banff and Yoho National Parks like a moving ghost town ourselves, passing both tourists and bears by the tracks.

After descending through the two extra-ordinary spiral tunnels, in which the train completes two-thirds of a circle inside a mountain, I get off at the town of Field and sleep in the clean, quiet CPR bunkhouse.  Field has changed too.  The town, deep in a canyon, was once a railroad village, but now it caters almost completely to tourists.  Bill Bell, who was here in the sixties, remembered it as a “cow-kickin’, slam-bangin’ town,” but now it seems almost peaceful.  The people I talk to in Field have the softly polished exterior of professional public servants.  It is a long way from the prairie.

“The older guys,” jokes Wayne Tetrault, “they get scared of the hills over here.”  Wayne is the locomotive engineer on CP Extra 9015, which I join in Field.  This is the beginning of the Mountain Sub.

Wayne’s 31.  He’s like all the young crew members I’ve met along this stretch of track – cocky, cheerful, focused on his train.  It’s true that when you get enough seniority here, you usually choose other subdivisions, but Wayne knows that it’s not fear: Other runs are simply quicker and easier than the Mountain Sub.

But there is plenty here to scare you.  This 125.7 miles of track consists of an initial downgrade, a tough upgrade through two tunnels, and a long, winding downhill haunts by the memory of one of the railroad’s most costly wrecks.

Right away we talk about disasters.

“I once hit a pile of snow near here,” says the conductor, Frank Bonanno.  “I thought we were going to bite the weeds.”

Railroaders take a certain satisfaction in remembering old wrecks, like the time a train hit a Ferris wheel east of Calgary.  (The Ferris wheel was being hauled to a county fair. No one was hurt.)  But for some reason, as we cross the Columbia River and start up the long grade on the other side, we don’t talk about the wreck that happened here one night in November 1977 just on the other side of the hill, when a train run by Timmy Hamm, Clarence Thacker, and three other men bit the weeds big time.

I have talked to both men and remember their story – a coal train without breaks plunging down 20 mph track at 50, 60, 70, 85mph; the hammer and scream of wheels; the expectation of death; and the bloom of light at the end, when the train came apart just behind the lead locomotives, plunged into a river and burst into flame.  I remember Thacker’s description of how the locomotives, freed from the wreck, glided to a stop in the eerie light of the fires, and how, after a while, he heard the supervisor estimating damage over the radio. “In excess of three million dollars,” the super said, and Thacker, alive beyond any expectation, leaned over the side of the locomotive and threw up.

But now we don’t talk about it, maybe because everyone who works on the railroad knows that, as Timmy Hamm said to me: “This could of been anybody’s train. You just happened to be the person who’s called for it, and there you are.”

The trouble that calls for us is not the hill, but the power.

Our last two engines are running with the doors hanging open, but that doesn’t help. As we emerge from the Mount Shaughnessy Tunnel, a poorly ventilated, mile long hole in the Selkirk Mountains, three of our four engines, cooked in the tunnel, switch out of action.  The train, with the last surviving unit pouring its smoky heart out in futile effort, comes to a roaring halt.  We’re stuck.

These power problems are getting absurd.  Ten days ago Wayne stalled inside this same tunnel with a coal train.  The place filled up with diesel smoke so fast he had to dissconnect his units from the rest of the train and drive out to open air just to stay alive.  I happened to be in the railroad’s offices in Revelstoke at the time and overheard the engineer on the radio.  The two men on the crew knew they would have to go back in that place sooner or later, and the engineer was discussing the train’s emergency gas masks.

“i’ve been reading the literature on these masks,” he said, a little plaintively, “and it says ‘Use in a well-ventilated place.’”

Well-ventilated does not describe this tunnel.  We’re lucky we didn’t get stuck in there ourselves.  As Wayne and Frank work to get the train inching forward, I look back.  Clouds of smoke pour from the tunnel’s mouth.  It looks like the gates of hell.

“Where are you, Wayne?” asks a voice on the radio, the engineer of a train behind us.  “Stalled,” Wayne says.  “Got four on the head end, and three of them died.”

“Only three?” the voice says sardonically.

I remember what another engineer said when one of his engines gave out: “The leaders of the company now are ivory-tower people.  The power’s falling apart; the tunnel isn’t working.  Yet they’ve got these big projections.”

The Canadian Pacific’s history has always been full of contention; if this were an Old West family, it’d be riven by feuds, subterfuge, and gunplay.  Today the issues are the killing of branch lines, the subsidies, the railroad’s attempts to streamline.  A CPR handout itself acknowledges the rough edges of its own reputation: It shows a farmer staring at a flat tire on his tractor: “@>%^#!/ the CPR!” he says.

But the day-to-day partnership between rail and farm has power of its own.  It may be running with its doors open, but it’s still going up the track.  There’s something sustaining about the value of the work itself.  If I come back here in ten years, I’m sure Dennis Smith and Terry Hanson will still be farming, and Bill Bell, Duane Weekes, and Wayne Tetrault will still be working on the railroad.  Ten days ago when Wayne was involved in the smoky stall in the Mount Shaughnessy Tunnel, he eventually put on one of those masks and drove back into the smoke to help pull the train out.  This was loyalty not to his bosses, but to his train – and in a way, to his partnership with Bill Bell, and the people of the Tyvan Sub.

“I guess you do it,” he says now with a shrug. “Whatever it takes to get the train going again.”

For all the railroaders I met from the Tyvan to Vancouver, that was always the bottom line.

The wheels keep moving, and the grain rolls west.  The scanner calls in our progress: “Total axles 384, no alarms.” It’s a different voice out here.  In the mountain region someone decided that the scanner took too much radio time to give its reports, so the automated voice was sped up.  Now the authoritative thirsty guy in the hut chirps out reassurance as if he’s been breathing helium.

Finally, on the afternoon of the fourth day after leaving Moose Jaw, I ride with the grain into Vancouver.

The last miles are fast.  It’s double track: no meets and 50 mph.  The prairie could be half way around the world; this is utterly different landscape: mountains, forest, and water.  We pass a cedar-shingle yard, kids fishing under a bridge, and a huge sulfur terminal surrounded by heaps of yellow.  The tall skyline of the city shows up ahead.  At last we coast into one of the many tall grain terminals on the shore of Burrard Inlet.

The engineer, David Partridge, backs pieces of the train into three different sidings.  He has to talk on one radio frequency to his conductor, and on another to a yard engineer he calls Long Country.  He has to trust the radio voices completely; as he backs up blind, he looks serenely ahead.  This is incredibly hectic compared with the steady running of a train cross-country, and I wonder how long before he starts whistling “Moon River.”  It turns out he’s having a great time.  In the middle of it he grins at me and says, “See what we have to go through?”

Soon each car will be pushed into the terminal, and an operator will open its hatches with a pneumatic crank called a sidewinder.  Grain will pour out in a sudden smooth golden rush, and the car will creak as its coiled springs rise.  In 12 minutes the car will be empty.  The grain will be cleaned and graded.  The chaff, seeds, and even dust will be siphoned off and turned into feed pellets.  The clean grain will be stored and eventually run across a high conveyor into a ship.  Today the ship is Pisces Pioneer, a Hong Kong vessel taking on 33,000 tons of soft white spring wheat, bound for Chile.  I can see dust where the conveyor dumps grain into the hold.

I get off the train.  I look around at the tall Vancouver skyline, at ships waiting in the harbor.  Behind it all I see the Tyvan Subdivision: Heward, Creelman, and Fillmore.  I miss it.  I miss Nicolina’s, Eliford and Josh Mott, Dennis and Judy Smith and their kids, that spirited next generation of the land.

You can’t see many things on the prairie, but everything you can’t see goes down deep.  Whine I started, I thought the tough side of the tracks was the challenge of the mountains.  I was wrong.  On the prairie the mountains are in the ground: the hard terms set by the land and the railroad.

The dream sketched out over a century ago by the pencil line of tracks has come true more grandly than the dreamers imagined.  Now the dream is aging, and the power that drives it is ragged.  But the dream runs deep.  The people of the prairie reach down into the earth with that calm resolve of generations and take hold among the invisible mountians.  With strength of arm, will, and history, they bring up life.  Then a train comes by, run by people who have also been doing this for generations, and takes the life to the world.

Tags: Canadian Life, Trainz by Roadwolf
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By now, I would hope that you are aware of how to build and maintain a growing city.  Ensuring you have a steady stream of income, while expanding your industries.  I will not as often be reminding you to check on your income levels, or your citizens needs, as I assume you can do this on your own now, and react accordingly.  This section will mostly be about Quests and preparing for them.

Be sure to check out my general guide and chapters 1 through 4 walk-through as well.

Chapter 5: A storm breaks out

When this chapter starts out, you will likely be in the red in terms of income.  Al Zahir asks you 3 things; Help him against the Crusader Army, Deliver Relief Supplies to him (8 Leather Jerkins), and Settle 690 Patricians in Guelphdon.

Since we are running in the red, I would suggest building some Houses in Guelphdon until you get a good healthy +100 or so income.  Soon after you start building, Marie will send her ships to attack Al Zahir’s Warehouse at Dar el Marisi.  Send your Flagship to gather his people.  Do not worry, you need not attack any of Marie’s ships just yet.  Return Al Zahir’s people to his Main Harbor (Shapur el Sheik).

If you time it right, by the time you have dropped off the rescued people from Dar el Marisi to Al Zahir, you will have enough Patricians (690) in order to manufacture Leather Jerkins.  If not, then create more houses and wait.

Al Zahir wants you to settle an Island to the North East where he says you can find a River to help with the Leather Jerkin production.  In order to settle the Island, we will need Tools and Wood.  Chances are we will have barely enough on Guelphdon to provide for a new settlement.  I recommend checking your Toolmakers Workshop in Guelphdon (it is located on the South West side of the Island).  There is a Weapons Smithy located next door which seems to be consuming all of the Iron.  We should have a decent surplus of Weapons by now, so halt production on the Weapon Smithy for now, to increase your Tools production.

Once you have 20t of Tools, and 20t of Wood, load it onto your Flagship and set sail to find the Island in the North East where you can produce Leather Jerkins.  Once you have placed your Warehouse on this new Island, Al Zahir gives you a new Quest, “The eyewitness report”.  He wants you to pick it up from his Warehouse, so let us send our now empty Flagship over to pick it up.  Once you pick it up, he asks you to deliver it to Marie d’ Artois.  I would suggest however, simply returning your Flagship to your Harbor, while we bide our time in order to develop a settlement on our new Island (Roseyard).

I built Roseyard up to a Settlement status. I also built a charcoal burners hut, a salt mine, salt works, stone quarry, a pig farm, tannery, lumber jacks hut (or a couple of them), and a fishermans hut (not nesseciarly in that order, obviously you will need lumber, stone and fish first).  Feel free to develop it even more if you have the money and resources.  Try to keep the Islands balance in the positive or atleast as close to $0 as possible.  Keep in mind that if you produce extra goods, you can set your Warehouse to sell the surplus.

I set my Warehouse on Roseyard to sell off additional Tools, Wood, Salt, and Stone – Leaving at least 10t of each in storage.  How do you do this? well just go into your Warehouse in the Trading tab, and select to sell an item (Red -) then click on the item and move the slider to how many tons of the Good you wish to keep in storage no matter what.  The Warehouse will never sell off anything less then that amount to other players trading ships.

As an additional tip, you will see in the above screenshot that I have Ships and Towns in my tool bar.  In addition to buildings and menu options, you can also drag ships and towns into any part of your interface for quick reference or to select them quickly.  Ships and Towns under attack will flash red.  You access your ships and towns by pressing F12.  I am sure you can also drag Army units on to your interface as well.

Anyhow, getting back on track…  I created a trading route for Roseyard to bring Leather Jerkins to Guelphdon.  You may also want to go over what else Guelphdon needs and cross reference with anything you have surplus in Roseyard.  Allow Guelphdon to receive a few shipments of Leather Jerkins (as your people are demanding them) and then load any surplus onto your Flagship.  Load up about 20t of Tools, and 20t of Wood as well.

Once you have your 8t of Leather Jerkins, ship them on your Flagship to Al Zahir.  Then send your Flagship to Marie’s Island to Deliver the Grand Vizier’s Report.  Once delivered, return your flagship to Kuhrang which Al Zahir will have gifted to you.  You will need to rebuild it, so drop off the Tools and Wood.  Then send your Flagship to investigate the wreckage for the Quest “A Suspicious Wreck”.  Meanwhile with Kuhrang now supplied with Tools and Wood, we can now start rebuilding it.

Down at the Wreckage site, you will find a Flotsam.  Pick it up, and send it to the Centre of Wisdom as suggested by Al Zahir.  Meanwhile, remember to re-activate your Weapons Smithy and then set off to construct 5 small Warships in Guelphdon.  Also Queue up 1 small trading ship.  Why 5?  Why not 3?  Well the extra ships will help.

Meanwhile, now you have time to build up your settlement on Kuhrang.  Remember to build more fields for your Date farms.  You likely wont need 3 full Date farms.  Remove one or 2 of them.  Also remember that you need a Small Noria to pump water for your Fields.  Build also 2 Goat Farms to produce Milk.

Once your warships are complete, send them down to the Centre of Wisdom.  Be prepared to battle against a constant onslaught of Marie’s warships.  You will likely have to produce some more small Warships in order to cycle them though repairs.  Also be sure to pick up the dropped Flotsams from the ships you destroy.  You will likely find things which will help you in battle.

Use this time to expand your settlement on Guelphdon if you need more income.  Once you get some cash coming in, Build a couple Lumberjack Huts and a Stone Quarry on Kuhrang.  Also build a Paper Mill on the River there, and an Indigo Farm.

You should now have enough Dates and Milk in Kuhrang in order to complete Al Zahir’s Quest: Support for the refugees.  Load your Flagship up with 10t Dates and 10t of Milk, as well as 5t Paper, and 5t Indigo in Kuhrang, and send it off to Al Zahir’s Harbor.  If you have enough Diplomatic Rank to build a Quartz Quarry, then build one on Kuhrang, Otherwise be sure to Purchase some Quartz from Al Zahir.  Then sail down to the Centre of Wisdom and deliver your Indigo and Paper.  Sail back up to Guelphdon and Deliver your Quartz.

Once you deliver the Dates and Milk, Ibn al Hakin will ask for 5t of Paper and 5t of Indigo.  Luckily you already have Indigo and Paper on your Flagship…  You should have a trade ship on a route between Kuhrang and Guelphdon, if you do not, you should have one sitting idle or able to be freed to preform this task.  You should now deliver Indigo and Paper from Kuhrang to Guelphdon.  Also, it is a good time to think about Expanding your Spice Farms in Kasadir.

Brother Hilarius will have already asked you to provide him with 10t of Bibles (Books).  In order to build this, we need Glass.  In order to make Glass we need  Quartz and Potash.  Build a Forest Glasworks in Guelphdon. and then build a Glass Smelter.  Once you have 10t Glass, you can Build a Printing House in Guelphdon.

Ibn al Kahim asks you to find 2 wrecks.  The wreck on the Pearl reef will be guarded by Guy Forcas.  The wreck in the desert will be unguarded,  Send a ship there to search for items.  You have to actually look for them and click on the items, which can be quite difficult in the blowing sand.  The screenshot below, happened to be the box which contained the 1 Copper Key for me.  However I believe that the location is random.

Once you have the Key, send your Flagship (with some small warships as an escort) to investigate the Pearl reef.  You will find the wreck, but you will need to scare Guy Forcas’ fleet off before you can search through it.  To prepare for this upcoming battle, Al Zahir asks you to bring him 10t of War Machines in order to build some ships.

Al Zahir will ask you to check up on his Goat Farmers on an Island in the South.  Send your fleet there to check it out.  You just need to show up and fire a few shots at Maries ships to scare her off.  Now pick up the population in the Warehouse and return them to Al Zahir’s main Harbor.

In order to make War Machines, we need to reach the next assencion level.  This means we need out Patricians to be very happy.  They will likely be fairly well off as it is right now, but they will need Beer, and maybe Security (A Debtor’s Prison).  Beer is easy, make a couple Wheat Fields, and a couple Herb Fields…  And a Brewery.  Make any other arrangements you need to advance to Noblemen.  Keep in mind that you do need 1190 Patricians in order to gain access to Noblemen.

Once you have Noblemen, Build your War Machines shop, and wait till you get 10t of them.  Then deliver the 10t of War Machines to Al Zahir’s Ship Yard.  He will give you 5 Warships.  Assemble your fleet and head back to Pearl reef to destroy Guy Forcas’ Fleet.

Return the Lockbox and Key to Al Zahir.  He will ask you to take a Corsair Treaty to Marie.  Before you do however, Brother Hilarius has a White Flag for your ship.  Activate the White Flag on your Ship and send the Ship to Marie’s Harbor.  Marie will join forces with you.

Her ships will become yours, so try to protect them as they retreat to your Harbor.  Al Zahir will also offer to build you more Warships.  Send him as many War Machines as you can.  Repair your fleet and be ready for a battle.

Hidden Quest: Distress call to the sultan.  Click on Al Zahir’s Warehouse.  He will give you an escort quest to escort his ship to safety.  You have to bring some ships to his Harbor to start the quest.  I would suggest 4 large Oriental Warships.

In return for the Hidden Quest, you receive 5 more Oriental Warships.  Now you should have no problem kicking Forcas’ ass.  Lets go kick some butt…

Once you have destroyed Guy’s fleet, the Chapter is over.

Chapter 6: Caught in a Trap

First off, you may notice that this Chapter is completely timed.  As far as I know there is no way to actually win this Chapter, you just have to try and hold out.

I played through more of this chapter in Slow Speed.  But I was also taking notes for this walk through.

I suggest placing 3 towers and a few encampments of soldiers in the general area of the screenshot shown below.  Do not place your troops any closer to the shore then your Towers are located.  You do not want to be too close to where the enemy lands.  Also build 3 Fisherman’s huts on the north shore of the Island where you will find a empty beach just North of the City.  Save room for a Warehouse (Harbor) which you will need to construct there later.  You will also want to build some (3) Cider farms and (3) Hemp farms up in the North West.

Down on the Island that Kardinal Lucias has landed on, you will find a Warehouse with a hidden quest.  Send your Flagship down to rescue the people from the Island and you will have completed one of the hidden quests.

Be sure to connect the Robber Baron Castle to a Market Building in order to access his troops.  They will be handy!  Be sure to rebuild the old city walls.  That is part of a hidden quest as well.  Also, in the North East of your Island you will find a Weapon smithy which is disabled.  Re-enable it to get more Weapons.  There is also a Tool makers shop nearby which is disabled – enable it if you wish.

Hidden Quest: In terrible distress.  To the East of your Island you will find a small cove with 2 of Kardnial Lucis’ warships guarding it.  Inside the cove is a friendly ship which is trapped.  Take on one ship at a time with your Flag ship.  You will need to repair in between battles.  Therefore build a Repair crane.  But I suggest doing it on the North side of your Island.  Build a Harbormaster’s Office near your Fisherman’s Huts just North of the City Walls.  You will get the Flagship as a reward.

Meanwhile you are likely going to be facing an attack soon.

Hidden Quest: Troop Supplies.  Produce 10t of Provisions in the Provisions Storehouse at Edenisle.  Get this quest from the Provisions Storehouse to the East of your City.  This quest is easy enough, however you may have to deprive your population of Beer for a few minutes.

Hidden Quest: Noble privileges.  Ensure 333 Noblemen move into the City.  Get this quest from the Market Building next to the Keep.

Marie wants you to build 2 War Machines workshops.  That is easy enough assuming you have the gold.

Spies show up in your City,  you have to find 3 spies in the gated part of the city.  You will find the miners camped just to the eat of your city.  They are hidden.  Send a small infantry division out to the east, just east of the East wall, in the open space.  And you should find them.

.. Honestly it will take me a few tries to get everything for this mission.  Just ride it out, hold back the enemy troops – keep building your own troops and supplying your current troops with provisions.

Eventually Marie will give you a map to find Al Zahir.  Activate it on one of your 2 Flagships and wait.  Eventually you will see that Al Zahir is sending his fleet to rescue you.  Hold out until he gets here.  When he does, he will offer you a ride off the Island.  Once you board onto his ship, the Chapter finishes.

I was able to hold the city, and prevent the enemy from coming near my walls.  And even had the luxury to wait and try to get 333 Noblemen to move in…  Honestly I saw my Noblemen population go from 300 to 700, then back down and up again a few times.  The quest did not seem to complete in the game, but at the end of the game it showed as complete.

The only quest I did not get was Escape with difficulties. I am unsure what that quest is???

Chapter 7: The Man with the Mask

Al Zahir is kind enough to harbor us in his protection while we try to prepare to strike back at Kardinal Lucious.  Our Island, Diyah is a fairly large desert Island.   Al Zahir reports that our Emperor is resting not too far away.  He also requests that we build a Date Plantation.  Might as well send your flag ship off to find the Emperor while you work on setting up a Date Plantation and some more houses.  You should also build a Lumber Mill.

Hildegard von Lewenstein (The Nun) tells you that the Emperor is very sick and is not seeing anyone except family.  But she also adds that Richard has been rumored to have been spotted being held captive nearby.

The Nun tells us to go Searching for Clues about where Lord Northburgh is located.  She sends you to speak with the Alchemist, Al Rashid, and The Witch.  The Witch will be the person you need to talk to.  Load up 5t of Milk, 2t Tools, and 3t Wood into your ship before you go however, as she will want some milk before she gives you information.  In order to get the Milk to her, you will need to build a Warehouse and a road to connect to her Tree House.

The Witch tells you that the message is encrypted.  Be sure to place the message into your ship before you leave, it will be located in your Warehouse on Sheepbridge.

Bring the Message to the Alchemest, which is located on your main island.  You will need a road connection to him in order for him to be able to help you.

Long story short, you need to create an Indigo Farm on Diyah.  Sadly it is impossible to create a Paper Farm.  You can however purchase Paper from Al Zahir.  In order to produce Indigo, you will need more population.  Now is the time to start building.  Purchase tools from Al Zahir if you run out.  Likewise now is the time to build your Rep with Al Zahir…  Funny he doesn’t remember your reputation you built up in previous campaigns.  Anyhow, you can get a ‘Princely attention’ letter from The Nun.  Get that and bring it to Al Zahir.

Plant your Indigo, and wait for 6t of it.  Once it is ready, transfer the 6t to your ship and sail out to the “Island of no return”.  Park around back (works best I think) and wait.  Your crew will draw a map.

Meanwhile, Al Zahir, wants you to build a Carpet Workshop, and Silk plantation.  You can build a Silk plantation on an Island in the West.  Load up 10t Tools, and 15t Wood and head out West to find the unclaimed Island.  Build a Noria, and a Silk Plantation.  Then assign a ship to transport the Silk back to your Main Island.

Since you already have Indigo on Diyah, you will be all set for Carpets once you start receiving Silk.  Build a Carpet Weavers hut.

Once you have the Map, bring it to The Nun.  She’ll give you another ‘Princely attention’ letter, to give to Al Zahir.  Likewise, you will need to create 120 Envoys in your city to gather enough volunteers for the next quest.

In order to do this, we need to Build a Clay Pit, and a Quartz Quarry.  Then we need a Mosaic Workshop, and finally a Mosque positioned in such a way as to cover as many Nomad houses as possible.  Note: You may also need to build another Date Farm, and Goat Farm.

While you wait for Envoys to move in, send a ship up North to Hopton with 20t Dates and 20t Milk on board and click on the Warehouse.  This will complete the Hidden Quest: News from Marie.  (Note: if your Date and Milk production are below par, add more Date Plantations and Goat Farms!)

Another Hidden Quest: Sensational!  Click on the Alchemest’s Tower and he will give you a Quest.  Deliver 10t of Iron Ore and 10t of Gold ore to him to complete it.  You can buy both from The Nun.

Another Hidden Quest: The Prophesy.  Deliver 20t Quartz to The Witch.  (Get the quest by clicking on her Tree Fort).

Pick up as many rep letters you can from The Nun to give to Al Zahir.  We will need to advance to “The Caliph’s favorite” in order to build a Coffee plantation and Roasting house for the Quest: Black Gold.  You can build Coffee Plantations on the Island directly South from your main island.  You should already have one ship running a trade route for Silk,  Why not use the same ship and run it to both the Coffee Island and Silk Island in one run, to create a sort of Tirangular trading pattern.  Make sure you bring Mosaic to your new island as well, as the Coffee Plantation will require it.  Build a Roasting House in Diyah, and you should be well on your way to completing ‘Black Gold’.

Once your Miners are ready, use the Move Command (they will be located near your main City) to move them near the Island of no return.  When they get there,  build a Tower on the Shore, and then you will have to build a tunnel under the fortress.  Be sure to Disguise your unit before they start digging.  You will have to position them close to the tower for them tobe able to dig.  Use the Attack command on the small tower beside the larger part of their Keep.  The Mission Arrow will be directly over it.  It is hard to know exactly where to click at first, but you basically have to click on the Southern most tower of the Keep.

You will have to turn your Fort into a Warehouse.  You can do this by selecting your Fort and in the Bottom Right corner, click Upgrade Castle.  Richard is located in the Strong Room.  He will want a ride to see the Emperor.  Have a ship ready to take him to see The Nun.  Meanwhile, send your Miners back to Diyah, and locate them as shown in the screenshot below.

Hidden Quest: Reparation.  Deliver 20t Mosaic, and 20t Clay to Al Rashid in payment for damaging his Keep.  (click on the Keep to activate).

Hidden Quest: The struggle continues.  Bring 20t Coffee and 20t Carpets to Hopton’s Warehouse.  (Click on Hopton’s Warehouse to Activate).  You get 20t War Machines for this Quest.

Send Richard to see the Emperor.  Then send your ship to The Witches.  Give them the package that Richard gave you.  You will have to quickly set sail after the ‘Cursed Ship’ and destroy it once The Witches figure out that they stole a secret recipe.  You will find the recipe in a Flotsam.  Return it to the Witches.

Quest: Time is running out.  Remember when I told you to return your miners to that exact spot near your city?  Well this is why.  Dig under the ruins just North of them.  Chances are 3 to 1 that you will find the Black Pearl.  Otherwise, send your miners off to one of the other Islands.  Look specifically for the large skeletons directly beside the ruins.  That is where the Pearl will be.  As for the four juices, you know where to get the Gold and Iron Ore.  Izmir supplies the Silver Bar.

Hidden Quest: Black Assassins’ drink.  Al Rashid asks you to bring him 20t Milk and 20t Coffee.

Hidden Quest: The red herring.  Build 3 Oriental Warships for Phillipe Lamour, of Hopton. – This is a semi-difficult quest, and honestly, it is not worth the effort involved unless you just want to complete the quest – or to hear a tiny bit of a teaser as to what will happen in the next chapter.

Once you deliver the Pearl and four juices, and then deliver the final potion to Richard, the chapter ends.

Chapter 8: Pillars of Justice

I want to thank a reader for suggesting this solution to Chapter 8, which is better then my own.  I have tried it this way, and it is a lot easier.

Tags: Computer Game Reviews, Computer Help and Advice, Computer Stuff, Uncategorized by Roadwolf
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Saw it with my own eyes tonight.  2 BPD officers in a Liberty Taxi Crown Vic (Dark Blue in Color) equipted with undercover flashing lights, pulled over a speeder on Niagara Street.  Very sneaky and a great idea.  I thought this was a Buffalo original as I had not heard of it before,  but my friend “unlisted” showed me a video of a NYC undercover taxi.

Tags: Buffalo Life by Roadwolf
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Just wanted to update everyone on my long term project in Trainz called RWL.  It is a scale simulation of a fictional mountian pass mainline route, with spurs, yards, towns and working industries.  In all total, the Route is about 100 scale miles at this time.

Kachinahey was a Junction town which I created when I was doing a demonstration on how to build routes with TRS2006.  I am happy to report that it is still very much an active town.

Recently I have added some industrial sidings, including a Gravel Pit, and a Furnature Factory.  I also added a 2nd track on the mainline, which serves both the Mainline and the Kachinahey Subdivision.  Also, while I did fully cover the hills with pine trees, I found it lowered my FPS too much for me to be able to work on it.  So I removed some of them for now.  I do plan on having the route look very realistic in terms of its tree coverage however.

I also expanded the Kachinahey Subdivision to meet up with a town called Wright where there will be a small yard.  Beyond Wright is going to be a Nickle Mine.  There is also another Railroads trackage which joins ours at Wright, and will presumably share our trackage down the Scajaquada Valley.

Further down the Mainline, there is a new town called Leamington.  This town has a Chemical plant, and a Logging Camp.  It will also likely have another industry, but space is limited.

All in all, the route is progressing slowly but steadily.  I am enjoying Trainz, and it does satisfy my desire for a model train layout which I have always had since I was a young boy.

Tags: Computer Game Reviews, Trainz by Roadwolf
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I just read a recent issue of National Geographic about the Yellowstone Supervolcano.  I am actually very surprised about how large an erruption would be.  This map shows the extent of the pyroclastic cloud which occured 640,000 years ago.  As you can see, an event of this magnatude would likely wipe out most of the western US.

The cauldra is only 5 to 7 miles below the surface, and is being fed by a giant lava plume which extends as deep as 400 miles into the earth.  As the plume vents gasses, the gasses rise and create more pressure in the cauldra.  This causes the land to rise, small earthquakes and eventually a large erruption.

It should be noted, that a large erruption from Yellowstone would cause doomsday like effects.  We would likely be quickly forced into a nuclear winter and several plant and animal species would likely become extinct (to the horror of those animal lovers, I imagine, but hey, can’t save em all).  The loss of the western portion of the USA would not be as significant when you tally in the loss of life after the erruption.

Now in this day and age, I am sure we would be able to brave such a situation out.  We have technology and knowlege.  Heck, we have people living in space, and in the antartic year round now – I am sure we could survive the cooler weather.  The only problem might be a high concentration of acidic gasses in the air.

Anyhow, I thought of an idea about this, which I figured I would share.

So basically there are gasses which are trying to escape…   And there is heat which has to be disipated.  Well how about tap into that heat to generate power?  And at the same time we can tap into the Cauldra with vents, and control how much venting the cauldra does.  I am sure we have the technology to preform this task.  Obviously there are risks…  what if puncturing the cauldra with vents causes an erruption?   And how to prevent laval from coming up the vent pipes?  And how to prevent the vent pipes from melting?

I doubt any such attempts to releave the gas pressure will actually happen however, likewise I doubt any attempts to harness the steam and use it to generate power, will likely ever go through.  Mainly because it is a national park – and that would likely piss the environmentalists off.

But think of it this way.   If we pump water down there and then collect the steam from said water, we could help cool the cauldra (wishful thinking, I know) while we generate power.

Honestly, I am sure some ‘experts’ have already thought of this idea, but I felt the need to share my own thoughts and ideas, even if they seem very impractical.  Hell, drive a remote controlled tunnel boring machine down into it…  Evacuate the area, and wait.  It may produce a small erruption, but hopfully not as large as the one 640,000 years ago.  And since we manually released the pressure, it would likely be safe for another few hundred thousand years.

Tags: Nature, News by Roadwolf
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Welcome to Roadwolf’s guide to ANNO 1404’s campaign.  Considering I have never before written a walkthru for a game, I hope this one turns out okay.  Also be sure to check out my overview of the game which gives some basic introduction information on many game aspects.  http://www.roadwolf.ca/blog/?p=176

I am mostly done chapters 5 through 8.  Chapter 8 was a bit difficult trying at ard difficulty in order to complete every quest for me.  But none the less, I was able to complete the primary quest line in 8.  You can read it here.

Chapter 1: A declaration of faith.

First thing you have to do is to click on Lord Richard Northburgh’s (Richard’s) flagship which is anchored near your warehouse.  Richard instructs you to build a chapel with at least 8 Peasant houses in its influence area.  But first however, he wishes that you look at your marketplace.  Scroll in-land a little to the North and you will find your marketplace surrounded by 3 peasant houses.  Click on the market place.  Richard tells you that everyone needs to be connects to the marketplace by means of a road.  He also asks you to build 3 more Peasant houses around your Market.

If you are playing on expert, you have now exhausted your wood supply.  To compensate for this, build 2 Lumberjack huts near your Warehouse (but be sure they have enough room to grow trees around it).  Meanwhile, while you wait for your population to increase in your new Peasant houses, Richard wants you to check out your Warehouse.  Richard wants you to build a Fisherman’s hut, therefore build one Fisherman’s hut to the left of your Warehouse.

Richard offers you some more Tools and he will also ask if you want to donate 10t of Wood to him for his project.  If you wish to spend the money and purchase the Tools, go ahead, however Richard will gift you 3t of Tools when his ship leaves with your wood.  Click the green check mark in Richards dialogue box to agree to send him Wood.  This will trigger him to leave you a ship.  He will tell you he accidentally dropped your gift in the water while he was leaving.  You should be able to see its location while you look at your Warehouse.  Select your new ship, and right click on the flotsam.  This action will pick up the 3t of Tools that Richard left for you.  Transfer the Tools to your Warehouse by sailing your ship next to your Warehouse, and then opening its contents and left clicking on the tools in your ships hold.  Left click on the terrain to deselect the ship.

At this point I suggest building a few more Peasant houses.  I built 6 more.  This will hopefully allow your income to get back into the Green, as it is very likely in the Red at this point.  Meanwhile, Richard is asking for some Fish for his project.  Select your Warehouse to find that you have enough fish to send to Richard.  Load 10t of Fish onto your Ship, and send it on its way to Richards Island to the South (not his main city).  On the way there, you will pass by some Flotsams which Richard tells you is his, and asks for you to deliver them to his Harbour master’s Office in his main City.  Pick them up, Deliver the fish in the South, and Richard will also give you some Stone to deliver to his Main City.  Send your ship up to Richards Main City, and deliver his goods.

Upon Delivery, Richard will give you some more Tools and a decent amount of Gold.  He also asks you to map 2 reefs.  Send your ship out, yet again to each reef (consult the mini-map to see the locations, while you hover your mouse the Quest “Averting Danger” on the Quest bar).  The far reef in the South East should have some Flotsams floating around it.  Pick them up if you need more Wood.  When you have successfully mapped a Reef, the game will tell you, and you can move on to the next Reef.  When you have both maps in your cargo hold,  return to Richard’s main city, and give him the maps.  Also, if your wood supplies are full in town, you may want to sell him that Wood you picked up.  Afterwards return to your town and deliver the Tools you are still carrying to your Warehouse.

Note: For the hidden Find the Master Builder quest, you must do the following.  First, click on Richard’s Cathedral construction site in order to get the Quest.  Then you should find him sleeping beside a statue near the construction site.  Click on him and Richard will reward you with 1500 gold.

By now, your Town should have advanced to Settlement stage.  Build a Chapel within your towns Influence ring, being sure to try to include as many Peasant houses as possible within its influence.  Richard thanks you for your help, and the game fades to a cut scene where you are introduced to Guy Forcas for the first time.

Chapter 2: In the Sign of the Cross.

Guy Forcas takes over command, and is now going to be instructing you to do things for him.  The first thing he wants, is 15t of Fish, and 3t of Cider.  Richard is still around to help guide you for now, and he suggests building a Market Building.  I built mine North West of my Town.  Around which, I also built 2 Lumberjack Huts and 2 Cider Farms.  I then worked on expanding my population a little.  Place a few more houses around your Marketplace so you can generate some more tax income.

I also found that it might be a good idea to create an extra Fisherman’s Hut as well.  This will help you gather enough fish, without taking the much needed food supply away from your population.  You may need to sail to Richards Island to buy some more Tools (as your Peasants will be advancing to houses, and thusly will be using Tools in order to do so – Note: you can stop this for the time being, by denying them Ascension Rights).

Once you have enough Fish and Cider to spare without completely cleaning out your wearhouse, transfer the required amount (15t Fish, 3t Cider) to your ship and sail it to Guy Forcas’ main Island, “Tuckingham”.  Upon Delivery of the Food and Drink, Guy will ask you to Deliver a letter to Marie d’Artois whos Island is located just North of yours.  Send your ship with the letter up to her Island (but do not deliver it yet).  Guy will also ask you to produce and deliver some linen garments to him and gives you a 2nd ship in order to do so.

Again, you may need to purchase some more tools if you have been allowing your Peasants to advance.  Send your second ship to Richards to purchase some Tools.  Meanwhile Richard will ask you to read the letter intended for Marie.  Simply select your first Ship and click on the letter.  It should open up so you can read it.  Click the check mark to close it after reading it.

Deliver the letter to Marie, and watch how she reacts with joy upon learning that she has been requested to assist in this holy war.  She will ask you to gather 1 Weapons crate from Richards southern Island and deliver it to her.  Send your ship down to gather it.  At the same time you should build your Hemp Fields.  Meanwhile, Guy will also ask you to gather 10 volunteer from your Town to take to him.  Gather the 10 Volunteers around your town, you will see them with blue outlines.  Don’t forget to build a Weavers hut near your Hemp Fields so they can produce the garments for Guy Forcas.  Also, build a Rope Yard as well.  Meanwhile your first Ship should of reached Richards southern Island and been loaded with the Weapons.  Deliver them to Marie.  She will give you some Wood and Tools.  Leave your first ship in Maries harbor for now.

Meanwhile, Marie’s ship has run into difficulties North of your Harbor.  Send your 2nd ship up to assist it with 10t of Wood.  Upon returning from this rescue mission, load your volunteer soldiers into your second ship, and load 5t of Linen Garments and 3t of Rope into your second ship as well – if you don’t have enough yet, just wait.  Once your 2nd ship is all loaded and ready to go, send it over to Guy’s Island.  Upon delivery of the Garments, and Soldiers, Guy will ask for Rope.  Just so happens that you already have rope on your ship.

Guy will ask you to find a Monk on an Island in the North West upon delivery of the Rope.  Send your 1st ship (which should still be in Maries harbor) up to find the Island with the Monk.  Meanwhile return your 2nd ship to your harbor.

Once you reach the Island with the Monastery, build your Warehouse on the shore closest to the Monastery and connect the Monastery by road to your Warehouse.  You will meet Brother Hilarius, who is actually quite comical.  Load Hilarius onto your ship and send him to Guy’s harbor.

Before you deliver Brother Hilarius, if you wish to complete all the quests, read the following paragraph.  Otherwise feel free to deliver him to end the chapter.  For the Quest “The Feast”.  Load up 10t of Fish onto your 2nd ship and send it down to Richards Southern supply Island.  Click on his warehouse (on the Southern Island) and start the quest before your ship gets there.  He will give you 10t Tools and 10t Wood for bringing him 10t Fish.

For the Quest “The crusade swimmers” send your ship down into the South West.  You will find an Uninhabited Island.  Sail around it until you find the Quest (and the swimmers).  Guy will ask you to bring him the swimmers.  There are 5 swimmers in all.

Once you deliver Brother Hilarius to Guy Forcas, the game fades to a cut scene, and you have completed the 2nd Chapter.

Chapter 3: Departure for the Promised Land.

Guy Forcas begins the chapter in a manner which makes you hate him even more.  Right away, transfer 10t of Wood and as many Tools as you can into your flagship ‘Santa Maria’.  Send Santa Maria down to Port Sacral to build a Warehouse.  Meanwhile, I would scroll up to Hookburgh (where the Mountain Monastery is located) and purchase all the Tools and Wood from the Monks as it will take time for them to be delivered.

Build a Warehouse in Port Sacral for Guy Forcas.  But that is not enough, he also wants a Harbor masters Office.  To build this, requires some stone.  There is a stone deposit up in Hookburgh (now you know why I asked you to buy Tools and Wood up there).  Build a Stone Quarry (or 2) in Hookburgh to gather Stone.  Richard asks that if you have any spare stone, to send it his way for the Cathedral.  Also, you are asked to produce some more ships.  I would also suggest building an Ore Mine, Lumberjack’s Hut, Charcoal Burners Hut, Iron Smelter, and Toolmaker’s Workshop in Hookburgh ASAP.

I decided to build my Shipyard in Falconstone, because it was supplied with Hemp and Ropes.  So therefore, I had to send ‘Santa Maria’ up to Hookburgh to get some Stone to build my Shipyard, and ship the Stone to Falconstone.  4t of Stone is enough to build a Shipyard.  Note: you may have to buy some more Tools from Richard to Build on Falconstone.

In the newly build Shipyard, create 2 small trading ships.  Once you have a ship build, set up a trading route for it.  I set up my first route to gather Stone and Tools from Hookburgh, deliver it to Port Sacral, deliver excess Tools to Falconstone, and deliver and excess Stone to Richard, before returning to Hookburgh.

At this point you are probably running into the Red in terms of tax income.  Build some more houses on Falconstone.  You should also build some more Fisherman’s Huts as well.

Once you have enough Stone in Port Sacral, Build your Harbor masters Office in Port Sacral.  Guy will be his usually annoying self when you have completed the Office, and ask you to upgrade the Warehouse there.  You should also consider Upgrading your Warehouse in Hookburgh as well.

Extra Hidden Quest: “Doublets and tunics” – Get this quest from Marie d’Artois by clicking on her Warehouse.  Simply supply 10t of Linen Garments to Marie at her Warehouse.  She will give you 5t of Tools in return.

Follow up Quest to “Doublets and tunics”, “High Demand” requires you to deliver 40t of Wood to Marie.  She will give you about 1500 gold, and 1 Shipwright’s Hammer, which will reduce the building cost of ships in a Town.  Obviously you will use this wherever your Shipyard is located.

Guy is not happy with the Warehouse Upgrade.  He asks you to build Storehouses in Port Sacral.  As it turns out, you may need Wood in Port Sacral as well, I just set my trading route to Load Wood onto the ships at Falconstone, and then drop it off at Port Sacral.  Fast forward a bit, keeping an eye on your income, and the Wood supply in Port Sacral.  Once you have filled Port Sacral with Wood, slow the game back down and remove the ‘Load Wood at Falconstone’ command from your trading route.  It is advisable to build another Cider and Hemp farm.  As well as another Weavers hut.  You may also think about upgrading the Market Building on Falconstone.

Meanwhile, back in Falconstone, Build a Tavern for your Citizens.  Once that is done, scroll back to Port Sacral, and build your 4 Storehouses.  Guy asks you to deliver 10t of Iron to him in Tuckingham.  He also wants you to build him 4 small trading ships.  I shut down production at my Toolmakers Workshops in order to save up enough Iron to ship to Guy Forcas.  I also ordered 2 more ships to be produced in Falconstone.

Marie asks you to repair one of her ships in Port Sacral.  Build a Repair Crane there.  Once her ship is repaired, she sets off with her fleet.  At this point, I removed Port Sacral from my trade route.

Note:  Do not send Guy Forcas the 10t of Iron or the 4 small trading ships yet.  Unless you wish to finish the chapter without completing the following quests.

For the Quest “Cathedral Construction Delayed” deliver 5t of Stone to Richard’s City.  You have to click on the unfinished Cathedral in order to get the Quest.  This is a repeatable Quest which rewards you with Rope.

For the Quest “A huge responsibility” you need to click on the Warehouse of Marie’s former City (Inglebeck).  A citizen tells you that everyone has left.  It is your job to repair the city and bring back 500 Citizens.  Build a couple Fishing Huts on the North side of the Island, beside the other Fishing Hut.  Clear everything from your Trade route except Hookburgh.  Continue to load Stone and Tools in Hookburgh, and then set the next destination at Inglebeck, where you should unload your ships completely.

On the South end of the Island, near your Harbor, is a Ore deposit.  You can set up an Ore mine there if you wish.  There is also a Stone Quarry on the other side of the Harbor.  You will also find a large amount of Ore on the West side of the Island, with some Forests for Charcoal and Lumber Mills.  But Cider and Wood is really more important at this time as the quest only calls for us to build enough homes to ensure 500 Citizens move in.

Once 500 Citizens have moved in, you can send your 4 small trading ships, and 10t of Iron to Guy Forcas.  Your next and final quest on this chapter is to deliver 15t of Tools to a ship in Port Sacral.

Chapter 4: The Lost Children

Lord Richard Northburgh guides us to an Island called Guelphdon, where we must repair our ships and settle while we investigate where the ships carrying the children ended up.

First off, we must secure Stone and Iron to make Tools.  Build Market Buildings in the Open space to the North of the Town.  Also be sure to connect to the Mountain Monastery.  Not only will the Monks help you with Quests, but they also have Tools and Wood for sale.  In order to make a ron Ore mine, we need more population.  Build houses.  Meanwhile you can also preform the first Quest to find the first bath of missing children.  Speak to the monks and follow their advice to search to the North East of your Island.  You will find the children in a flotsam along with 12t of Tools.

I would suggest building a Lumberjack’s Hut and a Charcoal burners hut as soon as you are able to, as well as your Iron Ore Mine, Iron smelter, and Toolmakers Shed.

Brother Hilarius wants you to bring him the Children so he can care for them (Quest: Soaking wet children).  Transfer the children from your ship, to your Warehouse to complete this quest.

Richard will give you a gift for the Grand Vizier Al Zahir.  Go to his ship (move your ship closer to it as well) and click on his ship to receive the gift.  I recommend building a Repair Crane in your port before heading south, however.  You will get a reward for repairing Richards ship as well.

Brother Hilarius asks for you to provide for him 4t of Linen Garments.  This means we must make a Hemp plantation.  Send your Flagship south with the gift for the Grand Vizier, while you build a Hemp Plantation (Including a Weavers Hut and Rope Yard) in your town.

Upon Reaching the Grand Vizier, he gives you access to some Nomad buildings when you give him the gift.  He also tells you of a quest, to save one of his ships.  He requires 3t Ropes sent directly to the damaged ship which is at sea.  Luckily you already have a Rope Yard constructed.  Just wait for some Rope to be manufactured, and send it on its way!  Also be sure to give Brother Hilarius his Garments (you may have to deny the item from your citizens in order to get enough Garments to give to Hilarius).

Upon delivering Rope to the Grand Vizier’s ship, he will gift that ship to you.  It will have Children and various supplies in its hold.  Send the ship back to your port to drop the Children off to Brother Hilarius.  The Grand Vizier will also give you another main Quest: The Road to Karim.  Once the Children are dropped off from the gifted ship (”Ikara”), send it on its way Westward.  You will need the supplies aboard it in order to settle a new town on the new Island.  Of course since it is a Desert Island, you will be settling a Nomad settlement.

As you can see, Karim wants you to build a large enough settlement to support his interests.  After a few houses are built, you will likely be low on Tools, so buy some from Karim.  Meanwhile return to your main Island to ensure everything is proper with them first.  If everything is good, send your Flagship (with some Tools and Wood) over to your new settlement to help supply it.

You should make some Date farms ASAP.  The Screenshot above should give you a good idea where to position them for best results.  I also tend to include a Lumberjack’s Hut as well to produce some Wood.  You will also notice a Iron deposit within the influence ring of the Market Building.  Notice I did not use a Oriental Market Building, as they do cost more to maintain.  The normal Market Building (seen in the Background), will suffice.

You wont need a huge settlement to reach 145 nomads.  Just keep on slowly building Nomad houses until Karim congradulates you on building the settlement, and gives you some Children he found.  The Children can be found in your Warehouse.  Use one of your ships to ship them back to Brother Hilarius.  Meanwhile, build a spice farm on Ku’Raast (your new settlement) and set up a spice delivery route to your main Island with the ship that the Grand Vizier gifted you.  I was running out of room at my previous farming location on Ku’Raast, so I built one on the other side of the Island (see the Screenshot below), where there was a lot more room to work with for more fields.

Upon delivering the Children to your Warehouse in Guelphdon, the Grand Vizier will want to talk to you.  Load 5t of Spices and 10t of Tools onto your Flagship, and then send your Flagship down to meet him at his Harbor.  Meanwhile, check back at Guelphdon to try to get a house to advance to a Patrician Civ’ Level.  To do this, you will need to build a Tavern, and likely a 2nd Cider farm.

The Grand Vizier will give you a letter to attempt to coax the Mine Manager into giving you some Children.  Meanwhile you also recently got wind of a hidden Corsair ship in the South West.  Might as well head South West to find the Corsair ship.  You will find the Corsairs will not be very easy to deal with.  You will also get another Quest from the Grand Vizier to bring him Weapons so he can help you by giving you a Boarding crew.  We will deal with this in a minute, lets first go find out if the Mine Manager will be co-operative.  Send your Flagship over to the South East.

The Mine Manager will ask for 5t of Spices and 10t of Tools, Luckily you already have that on your ship.  He will give you a present and the Children.  Send the Children to Brother Hilarius.  The Present can be gifted to the Grand Vizier for more Diplomatic rank – you can drop that off on your way up to drop off the Children.

Once you have reached the higher Diplomatic rank with the Grand Vizier, he will offer you warships in exchance for 3t of Carpet (Quest: Carpet trading).  Meanwhile back in Guelphdon, hopfully you have reached Patrician level.  If not, work towards that now.

Brother Hilarius requests some Bread for the Orphans, and Richard asks you to build a Weapons Smithy.  Build a Weapon Smithy, Wheat Farm, Mill, and Bakery.  And also check on Ku’Raast, to ensure that its wells have not dried up.  Replenish them if they are low.  Also, you should have a Goat farm on Ku’Raast, if not Build one now.  But deny the Nomads from using the Milk.  Instead order your trading route to pick up the milk and deliver it to Guelphdon.

In order to complete “A crust of Bread” you will likely have to deny the Patricians from eating Bread for a bit to save up the 10t of Bread for Brother Hilarius.  Once you give him the bread, he asks for Milk.  This explains why we are shiping otherwise useless Milk to Guelphdon.  Once you have enough Milk, remove it from the trade route, and allow the Nomads access to it again.  Likewise allow the Patricians access to Bread if you haven’t already.

Meanwhile we can work on Ku’Raast while we wait for the Milk to be delivered.  The Grand Vizier wants Carpets.  Luckily we can produce both Silk and Indigo here in Ku’Raast.  Create a Silk and Indigo farm.  Another Spice farm would not hurt either.  Finally, build a Carpet Workshop.  By now you should have enough Milk in Guelphdon.

Load your Flagship in Guelphdon with 5t Weapons, and then send your Flagship over to Ku’Raast to collect the 3t of Carpet.  Once this is done, send your Flagship to the Grand Vizier.  The Grand Vizier will give you a boarding crew, and a warship to battle the Corsairs.

Send your Flagship (with the Infamous Boarding Crew) to the Corsair Ship in the South Wast.  Activate the Boarding crew by left clicking on it in the ships hold.  The 2 ships will connect with ropes and a sword battle will take place, which it seems that the Corsairs have the upper hand in.  To back up your guys, send in the new Warship to fire a few cannon shots into the Corsair ship while you have boarded it.  This should cause them to quickly surrender.

You will be able to take over control of the Corsair ship.  Send the Corsair ship up to Guelphdon to return the Children to Brother Hilarius (and get repaired).  Richard will instruct you to build 2 small warships.  You will need to build a small Ship Yard.  You will likely need another Hemp farm to help produce more Rope for the Ships, as the Weavers hut is likely consuming a lot of Hemp to keep up with the needs of your population.

Hidden Quest: Mine Explosion

Thanks to John Graham, of John Graham Software, who wrote in and informed me of how to complete this quest:  Once you have delivered the last of the children from the Corsair ship to Brother Hilarius, click on the Mine Managers Warehouse and he will ask you to bring him 10t of Tools, and 15t of Spice.  In return he will give you a Powder Keg which will help in your battle with the Corsair ships.

Once your Warships are built, you have your Powder Keg, and now all that is left to do is to send them to attack the Corsairs.  You should be able to easily accomplish this.  After the battle, Hassan ben Sahid asks you to come and pick up the children (aka ‘brats’).  He says that his buisness partner is upset and is on his way to exact revenge.  Return the Children to Brother Hiliarius.  Upon the return of this final batch of Children, the Chapter will end.

Note: I hope you enjoyed this Walk-Thru.  I will be working on Chapters 5 thru 8 over the next few days.  Stay Tuned!

Tags: Computer Game Reviews, Computer Help and Advice, Computer Stuff by Roadwolf
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