Railways

20190303

trams share some of railyards with trains. they do, because the trains run abnormally narrow gauges because small intercity trains and the trams came later and just used the same infrastructure to begin with

dunno exact gauge but narrowish

trains have also always gone through a lot of city area where they weren't able to just demolish everything in the way, so narrower gauges and trains proved advantageous in not crashing into random people's houses. this is also a good thing because this setup is kind of uncommon within the conworld too so several of the neighbouring countries can't just swap the wheels to navigate the narrow network, they have to switch trains entirely. invasion? nah, your behemoth trains literally won't through our tunnels, into the two free cargo trains you go

there was an initiative some 150 years before currentdate to fixer upper the rail system to fit bigger trains and gauges and everythings but it was never finished and after brief operation we ended up with a lot of tracks to un-renovate and some brand new branches of the rail network that nobody saw any value in so they just kinda stayed

= there's a lot of abandoned rail segments spotted around the country that nobody uses or can use

some rural areas have adapted these remains to run dual-lane routes, one tiny monorail cart on each rail. thanks to the bep's unwillingness to chop down trees to accomodate for air strips and the like, much the forested part of the country is inaccessible by any other means than train/shoddy monorail and sometimes dirt road

another slightly unusual thing to note about public transport in this country is that bicycles are quite rare, while various kinds of tricycles pop up just about everywhere. turns out people liked the added stability and luggage capacity more than they did speed, which is quite understandable since a lot of the road network is essentially spaghetti. note that the monorail cart things usually are built asymetrically, putting weights on their inner side allowing for a bigger cart outwards

then, war

DEPRECATED: URHEIMAT CITY

I have as many or few shaping wars as I want. I do have some shaping wars but I haven't found fleshing out the militaries that fought them important enough to work on yet, "they won somehow" suffices for now. one of the most shaping wars I have so far must've been the one where people discovered the plague and consequently died, this having taken place about 1700 years before $current.. had people randomly fleeing all over the place and as such redistributing themselves and their stuff.

kind of a "we've figured out how to do rice and castles, this is nice let's stick to this" and so they did. and then those castles and stuffs got ever so slightly abandoned. cuz plague. "shit, being here makes us sick, let's leave". people from somewhere else came along all chipper being immune to said plague and wanting to fight, ended up spreading plague and taking over the place because the locals flee from them and their illnesses. then the newcomers start trying to organize the previous therelivers' system of kind of overlapping nature and city by segregating city and nature, they end up being wiped out pretty much entirely by a wonderful coincidence of natural disasters and guerilla fighters feeling like getting revenge (but not really moving back in because their new forest homes are way better)

forest homes good cuz they're like the first area (as I said, city and forest overlapped a bunch anyway) but better because they've found more resource-rich areas to live in and organized the new place more systematically than the old ever will be lest they want to rebuild it from scratch

tldr the fresh start went unexpectedly well and set their standards higher than they were when they arrived

I'd also like to note that the guerilla thing wasn't exclusively because of revenge; seeing how it took place about a hundred years after the eviction event, it needed more motivation; that being pesky people living in the way of trade routes and refusing to cooperate even though the area "wasn't really theirs". but it doesn't end up being much of a war because the intruders have no idea how to deal with water poisoning and Very Big Storms (TM) when the city they took over isn't really suited for surviving either

part of the reason the Bep like their forests so much it that dense forest is hard to blow away, and if you've incorporated your home into the dense forest it's hard to blow away too. the area we're in sees a lot of really strong storms, which the long-time locals deal with by just tucking themselves into a semijungle and hoping for the best (which works really well might I add)

their old city required a lot of care and maintenance not to be blown away as it was, and its new owners just built away without accounting for the very windy conditions, which ended up costing them a lot of resources and inevitably the whole city. this whole ease of awayblowal was another reason the Bep stuck to their new place, since that was much easier to not have blown away. interestingly enough they prefer to keep clear of the ground as much as possible, so long as they stick to their trees the forest really is dense enough to protect them from the shitty weather, the only reason the invaders got fucked was that they didn't know how to use the forest to their advantage. the bep themselves view the ground as something they shouldn't be impeding on much because it's like nature and whatnot

for example houses are almost always above ground (except cellars and jails), because it'd be very pretentious to live on the floor when we're already using it for so many of its gifts. needless to say this people appreciates their nature a whole bunch (and not without reason, it's been responsible for their not being blown away for ages). the invaders who got screwed by the wind, btw, came from over a nearby mountain range that pretty much completely guarded them from the weather.

rails again

another thing to note is that because of these weather conditions many trains are made with an extra set of clamps hooked onto the outside of the rails so as to be harder to blow away (and also derail)

they're literally just bent pipes or plates but they kind of help so there's usually one or two by each wheel of a train. this isn't done on trams to make them require less space and bumpiness in roads, plus they should be easier to just yoink off the tracks if needed. in turn this means that trains can only run on dedicated tram track when their grabby support things have been taken off or folded up

Idea: public announcements are usually just made by loudly tooting melodies everyone knows, except in bigger cities where they're issued in melody and lingua franca. Leading to some tourists thinking the announcements are just for them, with a jingle at the beginning. E.g. "yo there's a flash flood gtfo" or "the wind is catching up, get inside"

Automated tooting Because it's easier to manipulate tooters and you can afford many of them

In ye really olde days people just managed this by having towers of spotters in towns, communicating with each other and outposts, and then climbing down and going "yo we're fucked pass it around" if they found their area to be fucked. Bells never really caught on as a means of signalling because the culture has so many wind chimes and bells and whatnots all over it'd be hard to tell which was the ambient and which was the alarm bell. Why did they develop such a fondness of bells/chimes? Well when you live someplace windy it inevitably happens.

Other systems that were used for message stuff earlier are sending mail by streams and, for more localized stuff, pulley-based rube goldberg machines (e.g. you pull the rope to honk a horn in an office two blocks down)

You'll often see water, power, and various other things being directed through big cable-like things suspended in the air. In modern time most of these have become thinner and more specialized but they're still a thing. Waste is usually handled by either using it as fertilizer, fuel, or (not anymore tho) tossing it into a ravine

Big bells aren't used because they stop being viable as the scale of cities approaches the size when they really need a warning system because that's also about the time temples with bells show up (bit like churches yea?).

also big bell warning period between settlement too small to need and settlement so advanced toots are more affordable and loud