flurries.  

Once the right track was aligned and locked, Aleu gave two blasts on his whistle and away the locomotive and engineer went.

Balto stood by the water tank. He watched as Aleu and Texas rattled up alongside, small dunes of fresh powder being kicked up by the beams of his cowcatcher. He clanked to a halt with one final blast of his whistle.

“I already checked it, the pipes clean.” Balto hollered up as Aleu clambered onto the Tender. She knew he meant that the waterspout wasn’t frozen.

“Start loading the wood.” She hollered back.

Balto brushed the snow off a pile of logs located by the tank. He quickly started chucking them up into the bunker. Careful not to hit Aleu who was now watching the water roar into the tank. Once it was at its mark, she lifted the spout, and before closing the tank, kicked some of the snow around the deck in.

While Balto finished wooding up the Texas, Aleu walked around him, filling his tallow cups, and taping his wheels and rods with a small hammer.

“You ready big boy.” She said to the locomotive.  The clack valve went off  as if to say: “Born ready.”

“All right then, lets do this.” Aleu silently replied.

She turned to Balto who was putting the last logs into the tender. “Where is our train?”

Balto wiped the dirt off his hands with a rag and pointed across the yard. “Track 4, it’s a load of boxcars filled with fish.”

Aleu nodded, then walked around to the back of Texas and opened his coupling. “Well, climb aboard.”

Texas ambled threw the yard, leaving a white string of smoke in the frigid air. The Yard was a maze of tracks and switches. Another train ahead, an open switch=one awful crash, and the engine would become a gridiron for her tender flesh. Yet Aleu kept the throttle open at a simple pace. Balto had placed some bacon on the fire door, and the smell was already perforating the cab.

Aleu backed onto the line of wooden truss rod boxcars. With a “chu-lunk” and the patter of snow falling of the newly made couplings, Texas mated with his train.
Balto swung down and connected the air hoses. After a brake-test, they where given the highball signal. Aleu gave two blasts on the whistle, and opened the throttle. The huge iron horse quivered and stiffened, as if bracing itself for its task; expelled one mighty breath, then another and another, quicker and quicker, shorter and shorter, until its respirations were lost in one continuous flow of steam. The Texas was on his way.

The locomotive responded to Aleu's touch with an alacrity which seemed almost human, and which, familiar though she was with the work, thrilled her through and through. She glanced at the timetable. They were twelve minutes behind time. But that didn’t matter; she would make that up on the tundra.

Texas roared out of the tiny town on top of the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A brave soul rides dragon, and even braver soul controls it.- Unknown 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inside the telegrapher’s office and the Safety Checkpoint, the telegraph receiver clacked out several messages. He then took the message jotted it down on appear and walked out into he cold air. The snow had stopped but the white clouds above made it clear it could start anytime. Stepped threw the snow next to the railroad tracks, he attached the message to a mettle hoop and held it into the air.

 

 

Of in the distance, the wail of a whistle could be herd. The rails started to him and with a shriek, roar, and a clank, the Texas came around the bend and past the lonely outpost. Snow flew from his pilot, which was dusted with white, the sun glinting off his brass bell as it clanged out its time honored warning.

           

Aleu leaned out the cab window. She was practically sitting on the windowsill, and grabbed the hoop in the crotch of her arm. Then with a blast of his whistle, Texas raced by with his line of boxcars, small flurries of snow kicked up and flying out from the under frame. Behind the caboose was a roster tail of white powder.

 

 

                        **********************

 

 

 

 

“We have the mainline.”  Aleu said reading the message.

 

 

Balto nodded and picked up another log for the firebox. Normally Texas ran on oil, with a log every now and then put in by Aleu. But with Balto riding along, Aleu took this chance to give the old boy a little bark for his bite.

 

 

The train was racing threw some of the most beautiful landscape imaginable. Craggy mountains and cliffs climbed high above the train as it wound threw the dark forests in the valleys. The tracks had left the Nenana River valley and where climbing into “Mountain Trail” an old sled path the railroad utilized. Aleu blasted the whistle for a tunnel, carved into the icy mountainside. As Texas descended into the darkness, his headlamp bounced off the ice, forming cacophonies of lights, rainbows, and all sorts of strange images and psycadelac light shows.

 

 

He burst out of the tunnel with a roll back of smoke and steam, and crossed a spindly looking trestle over a deep gorge. Far below, bits of ice and snow, knocked off by the passing train, fell onto the sharp icy spikes that where formed on the gorge floor.

 

 

The Texas now raced along the forested mountainside, providing a breathtaking view of the Alaska Range. McKinley glared out of the mist in a blood red evening sky. Aleu and her trainload of smelly perishables had the mainline, and she was going to make every second count to make up those 12 minutes. She opened or closed the injector, to economize heat and water, and eased the steam when it could be spared. Aleu coaxed, cajoled, threatened, and goaded her iron steed, like a veritable thing of life, Texas seemed to strain every nerve to do their bidding, and whirled them faster and faster over this icy fantasy land.

 

 

Balto stopped tending the fire and looked out the cab over the tender. “You know, sometime I wonder why I never left Nome for some warm line down in the lower 48. All I have to do is come out here to see why.”

 

 

Aleu smiled. “Its one of the reasons I did leave. Alaska is beautiful, but so is the Colorado range, the Appalachians too.  Tell me papa, you ever see the Blue Ridges glow Blue under a morning sun?”

 

 

Balto shook his head no.

 

 

Aleu smiled. “This railroad travels threw some of the most stunning landscape you can ever imagine…can you tell me if anyone else has a job that routinely throws them threw this?”

Balto smiled, understanding Aleu’s way of thinking. They were now winding through the Council Hills, where the road was as crooked as the sled dog trail it fallowed. The Texas jerked viciously from side to side, as if angrily resenting the pitiless goading from behind. But Aleu kept him in check, the two working as one soul. The wheels savagely ground the rails at every curve, and made them shriek in agony. One side of the engine first mounted upward, like a ship upon a wave, and then suddenly sank, as if engulfed. One instant Aleu was lifted high above Balto, the next dropped far below him.

Soon the twinkling evening lights of White Mountain came into view, Aleu blew a long blast, the tune reverberation among the hills. Soon she was closing the throttle, passing a train heading west, and rolling into the small 3-track freight yard in White Mountain. She had blasted threw here in the past, but now as she applied the brakes, feeling the iron wheels griping the icy rails, Aleu felt a since of unease arriving.

Then, with a grind, and squeal, and a bit of snow falling from the headlamp, Texas stood still and steady. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Jump Sim, Jump”- Casey Jones, five minutes before his locomotive plowed into the rear of another train.




Aleu looked at herself in the mirror inside the caboose. Her gray/blue eyes seemed as cold and as beautiful as the snowy world outside. She looked at her body, noting how she had matured so fast. In a few years she would be thirty. It sounded so old when she was twenty, and she knew it would sound so young when she was forty. She wished she could stop the clock and stay twenty-eight forever. Her fur had a warm red glow to it. But she reckoned this was because of the red lanterns that flickered inside the caboose interior. Outside she could here the wind howling.  

She had missed Star’s wedding after a freight lost its air passing threw the town, instead spending the time helping the crew repair the train line out in the street.  

She disrobed and stepped into the small shower inside the caboose. The water trickled out at first due to low air pressure. Aleu wondered if there was a way to work these things without having the use air from the brake cylinders. If someone hit the brakes right now, she would be suddenly hit with a torrent.

A knock came on the back door of the caboose.

“Come in.” Aleu barked.

Balto walked into the car, looking rather splendid in his brown suit. It matched his fur color stylishly.

“The reception is about to begin in half an hour. I really want you to go, and so does Star, you know, all of your old friends from Nome are there.”

Aleu turned the water off. “Old friends…yah right.”  

Balto frowned. “Well, at least know that I got you a gift for this occasion.”

“Gift?” Aleu said cocking her ears.

“Yes, I’ll leave it right here on

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