Kaiwera, Maoria, 1916

[Valles]

No, I'm not dead, just distracted by other games and projects.

Oh, and burdened by writer's block. Of course. >.<

This is only the first half of the letter; I don't really expect that the rest will 'write fast', but there's no sense sitting on what is ready.

Dearest Clara,

I write to you on this twenty-sixth day of January of the year of the Lord one thousand nine hundred and sixteen in good health and good spirits, having arrived today in the city which shall be my home for the coming months. My previous letter, detailing my journey to and arrival in this strange country on the far side of the equator, should have reached you well before this one, so I shall not belabor the details contained in it a second time.

Instead I shall tell you that I woke early and rested, well in time to dress and join my fellow lodgers for the morning meal. The conversation was mostly centered around my own life and home, as only four of the others had ever had occaision to travel beyond their homeland; a wife who had worked as a sponsored teacher in the Hawaiian Islands and brought her husband home to her family as is the custom among both their related peoples, a man of middle years employed as a seller for an agricultural tool firm who had once traveled to New Brandenburg to sell among those few Maori still living in remote regions of that country, and a most distinguished elder gentleman who had fought as a young warrior in the German settlement before taking ship after the Maori defeat.

Particularly strange to my audience were my descriptions of the arrangements of our towns and cities, being as the Maori arrange their metropoli on the theory that the duty of the roadmaker and urban planner is a descriptive one, concerned with locating and facilitating the patterns of travel already present in a settled area rather than determining by force where they should go. Another point of significant difference was the cuisine; the great feasts that are so often mentioned in reports from this country make up only a small proportion of its people's diets. Instead, they eat lightly at breakfast, late morning, and early afternoon, and more heavily late in the evening. Most fare is, I am told, vegetarian, with beans, rice or wheat, and breadfruit being the staples, with the occaisional small meat course or added component of dried meat or fish or sausage, and certainly the lodging-house's breakfast conformed to this pattern. The drinking of milk is unheard of past the age of weaning, or from any source save one's mother, and only the Hawaiian and his wife had ever tasted butter.

In my stories of hunting and of sailing with my father on his schooner, they found little to surprise them, though the small points of difference like the rigging of gaffsail rather than crab-claw, or the prevalence of deer as game rather than giant birds or iguanas, were the source of much interest.

After the meal, I gathered my trunk and bags and went out onto the peculiar second-story sidewalk to await my guide, whose promised special treat proved to be a VIP tour of the train's locomotive, which looked and proved to be very different from even the new Norman engines your father's company has purchased. Knowing my fiancee for the featherwitted, socially-obsessed bit of frippery that she is, and that she could never have any interest in so dull and masculine a matter as that, I shall skip over my tour and speak instead of the quality of the railway's cuisine, which was excellent but not at all the conventional sort.

Teasing you, my dear, is simply not the same without a bruise on my arm.

The engine was easily the largest I have ever laid eyes on, looming over its six-and-a-half foot guage track like a sapphire thundercloud streaked down the side with red and white. Through the services of my interpreter and my own poor Maori, the chief engineer for our trip informed me that his assigned engine weighed a full two hundred long tons and could manage a speed of seventy-five miles per hour given a minimal load and a level track. With a passenger train to pull, it would spend much of our trip running at a 'mere' sixty five, a pace half-again that of an ordinary steam engine.

It could sustain those speeds, I am told, because it was designed to draw its motive power from an outside source, in the form of electrical current carried along the wires I could, when they were pointed out, see strung above the track, safely out of untrained (if you will pardon the unintentional pun) reach even here in the very station, much like the streetcar system I recall you showing to me with such warming enthusiasm in Atlanta but these three months gone by.

In arrangement, the engine had four-wheeled tracking trucks at nose and stern, and twelve driving wheels, smaller than those of a steam engine but still substantial for all that they are on two seperate turning trucks of their own. The cab, with no need to be concerned about the heat of the boiler, could be placed at the middle of the engine and was designed to be operated either 'coming' or 'going', and in fact the entire assembly was so perfectly reversable front-to-back that I am told they are never turned on a table but instead simply attached to the front of a train coming the opposite way and no-one can tell the difference. Fore and aft of the cab are the great, drumlike electric motors, whose shafts emerge horizontally and are turned via gearing to run down to the common drive shaft of one or the other of the driving trucks. The vertical portion of the drive shaft of course runs through the truck's axis of rotation, and is arranged to compensate for the motion of its sprung section by this manner.

The upper section of the shaft, connected to the motor, expands at its bottom into a hollow barrel, whose inside is deeply and coarsely grooved and long enough that the star-shaped upper end of the bottom shaft, connected to the wheels, can fit inside and have room to slide up and down according to the play of the springs.

The design of the station was interesting to me for the way it apportioned space between passengers and cargo - the former in comfortable salons built into the high vaulted roof, the latter below at ground level. The roof is enormous, and covers much of the associated rail yard from wind and weather, so that a man desiring to board a train on the far side of the tracks from his entrance need only walk across the atrium, safely above the railbed, and descend on the far side to the platform. I am told that between the roof of the train room and the floor of the atrium, the designers of the station placed boxes of sackcloth and a third floor, in the hope that they would block and absorb the noise of the operation of the trains and leave the passengers above undisturbed.

Within the station's great open atrium are not only the many people waiting, like my guide and I, for their train, but several cafes and a number of small shops, tailors, barbers, shoemakers, and generally selling the minor, critical items of everyday life that might be left behind by a careless traveler with no time to retrieve what he has forgotten, as well as several shops which had for sale cushions all of the same size and shape and variously embroidered. At about twenty minutes to the hour, people began to finish their meals and put away their books, and at exactly fifteen 'til the great double doors were opened and passengers began filing down the steps to the platforms.

There were two of these to either side of the train, one at about the same height as would be found in our own country and the other raised nearly a full story above that and serving the second level of the enormous double-decked passenger cars, which, though not to as great a degree as the track guage, were still considerably wider than any I have seen or heard of in the Confederacy, and hence seemed from the casual outside glance to be only a little taller in proportion than the familiar single-level cars of your father's line.

Inside, the passenger coach I was aboard was well lit and airy, all blonde wood and generous windows, with a narrow corridor, lit by electric lights, running down the center of the car and framed to either side by the actual compartments, whose forward and aft facing benches are seperated by armrests into individual seats adequate for any but the most corpulent passenter, but lack any sort of padding, being instead made of clean straight wood. The large cushions that I had seen so many of my fellow travelers carrying, and had been advised by my guide to obtain for myself, proved to fit those seats precisely, and be a great improvement to the comfort of the voyage.

[The Rock Doctor]

I'm glad you decided to post it, incomplete or not.  It's a good read.

[Sachmle]

Yes, very well written. I especially enjoyed the '20s style joke. :D

[Valles]

Posting my notes for the other half rather than actually writing it, being as I've gotten distracted by shinies and another project for News that I want to strike while the iron's hot.

Inside, the passenger coach I was aboard was well lit and airy, all blonde wood and generous windows, with a narrow corridor, lit by electric lights, running down the center of the car and framed to either side by the actual compartments, whose forward and aft facing benches are seperated by armrests into individual seats adequate for any but the most corpulent passenter, but lack any sort of padding, being instead made of clean straight wood. The large cushions that I had seen so many of my fellow travelers carrying, and had been advised by my guide to obtain for myself, proved to fit those seats precisely, and be a great improvement to the comfort of the voyage.

(Trip: Due west, city into hills and deciduous forest, exposed dark rock faces and other signs of lava flows; power cables for train supported by A-frames, preference for tunnels and bridges over winding or sharp grades, separate eastbound and westbound tracks; train seats individual rather than bench but hard and wooden, guide brought cushions for them, design is standardized common enough to support a cushion-factory)

(Stop: Smallish town as the hills start to fade away, with four other railways leading out from its relatively large station, still w/ 2 story platform at exactly the same level as the last - due south, southwest, northeast, northwest. All of the others are electrified, with the same A-frames, but only single tracks)

(Trip: Still due west, land levels out, abruptly with a final cliff larger than most and extending to the horizon, notable small waterfalls; land dries out and opens up gradually after, trees marking rivers and creeks, route very straight and level. Lunch aboard train, with individual cars being called to the dining cars in turn. Research cuisine for details of meal? Chance to see flying mail catch, waiting bag grabbed with hook, delivery bag kicked onto platform, train never slows)

(Stop: largish town on the shore of a lake, other rail routes northeast along the lakeshore and due south; docks with cargo ships and barges; station and platform to the same model as the last stop)

(Trip: Due west for 2hr 15 min, cross major river via suspension bridge, southwest for 45min along riverside, great lake visible to north for 1/2 hr in the middle, treeless dry country for first hour or so with forest returning near the lake, flock of grass-eating birds like pony-sized roadrunners spotted early on)

(Stop: Smallish town by riverside, identical station and platform, secondary lines running due west, northwest, and northeast, heavy barge and ship traffic on river)

(Trip: Southwest roughly by riverside to shore of another great lake, then along its coast for last hour+ to reach the city, vast treeless plains visible from upper level of train away from the river for first portion, then more forestation from lake microclimate, water traffic visible the whole way)

As I finish this letter our train closes in on its arrival in that many layered city, Kaiwera, and I shall mail it from the station at the soonest moment and write you again to say what passes after that. Until that eagerly awaited moment, I remain, with all my love and devotion, only your,

Ethan

[The Rock Doctor]

Nearest thing I see to a "Maori News 1916" thread, so here it goes:

To:  His Royal Highness, Yuuno, King of the Maori
From:  Rey Alizandro, President, Gran Colombia
Date:  1 November 1916



Your Highness,

Several years ago, the Republic of Gran Colombia formulated a long-term plan for the development of trade and political relations in Asia.  In order to execute this plan, an immediate objective was to acquire a secure line of communication between Gran Colombia and the Asian possessions of its Iberian allies.  To this end, Gran Colombia subsequently purchased the Cook Islands, Eastern Samoa, and the Marquesa Islands from several stakeholders.  A substantial port presence was developed on the island of Tutuila at Pago Pago, a naval depot was constructed on the island of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, and a submarine telegraph cable was laid from Gran Colombia through the islands to the Brandenburger network to the west.

In light of both political turmoil in Asia and our impending acquisition of territory in Africa, we have reconsidered our needs in the central Pacific.  It is our view that guaranteed access to port and communications facilities will be necessary to support Iberian interests in Asia, but that social development of Colombian territory in the central Pacific is not. 

Were Maoria to compensate Gran Colombia for one half of its expenditures on naval infrastructure development* in Colombian Polynesia, we would be pleased to invite Maoria to enter into a condominium arrangement over the territory in general:

1)  The territory would simultaneously be Colombian and Maori.

2)  The territory would be administered on a consensus basis by a commission consisting of a Colombian governor and an appropriate agent of the Maori Crown.  Disputes would be resolved by third party arbitration.

3)  The territory's defence would be the joint responsibility of Gran Colombia and Maoria, with military forces cooperating under a joint command structure.  Military infrastructure would be jointly administered and accessible to both powers under all circumstances.

3a)  In the unlikely event of conflict between Gran Colombia and Maoria, the territory shall be considered neutral ground, with all armed forces to be withdrawn for the duration of the conflict.  If deemed necessary, a neutral third party would be jointly approached to oversee defence of the territories during the period of hostilities.

4)  The territory would qualify as a free trade area.  Goods passing from one country to the other, via the territory, would be exempt from duties and tariffs normally levied on imports and exports.

5)  Residents of the territory would have the option of acquiring Maori citizenship in place of their current Colombian citizenship.

6)  Ownership of the undersea telegraph cable would remain the private property of the Central Pacific Telegraph Company of Esmeraldas, but Maori interests would have the right to pay for the transmission and receipt of messages.

7)  Existent third party interests (private and non-governmental, such as the Green Cross) would be respected.

I look forward to seeing your views on this proposal. 

Sincerely,

Rey



*OOC Note:  after subtracting Hapsburger and French contributions, a one-half cost for a P1, P0, and D1 are estimated at $11.50 Military and 1.25 BP.