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Midgley - a gray squirrel with one arm (lost the other in the crash of 89) - to show them around.
About the metro / details to be consistent on:
The Simhalan Rapid Transit Company operates it, a private company, though the state-run National Mass Transit Trust owns most of the infrastructure. The NMTT forces some interoperability with commuter rail even in areas where it competes with SRTC subway service. It's a DC electric meter-gauge train. Most of it is underground, as it was built when the city was mature, but it runs above ground in the outskirts of the city (for cost reasons) and in the low-lying harbor area (where the water table is inconveniently high for a subway.) In the 17 districts of Simha City, it has 18 lines with 311 stations.
The lines are assigned letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and I lines ("Blue") run roughly north-south from the coast to the hills. J K L M lines ("Gold") run around the harbor, each connecting with the A-I lines. The N O and P ("Silver") lines, owned by the SRTC directly, connect to existing major roads or transit infrastructure in a more ad-hoc route, though each makes connection with one or more Blue and Gold lines. The Q and R lines ("Purple") are to service suburbs that did not have existing transit to the city at the the time the subway was created, and are owned by their municipal governments and leased to the SRTC. Each line has local and express trains except on the Q and R, which run as local out of the city and express in the city. The train technically runs 24h / day but service after 2300 and before 0500 is much sparser. (~45 minutes instead of ~10-20 minutes.)
There are a few privately owned cable cars in the very hilly parts of Simha city, which make connections with the subway.
Commuter rail (standard gauge) connects with a the Obsidian Peninsular Railroad in its (not Downtown) station in Simha City, and to suburbs as far as Banda Town. Some of these are effectively interurbans, traveling far into the countryside and one even goes to Banda Town, sharing track with freight. Several private or municipally-owned standard-gauge commuter railroads connect the more distant suburbs to peripheral subway stations.
The system also has the Simha-Kottai-Banda Electric Railway (SKBER), an interurban which runs on subway infrastructure to select stations in Simha City and is integrated with the street car system in Kottai City, also meter-gauge. Banda Town's streetcars are standard-gauge, but the SKBER goes downtown as an elevated railway there.
The Q line was recently extended to a postwar settlement, Mastapar New Town, as well as an additional station in the suburb originally serviced by the Q Line, Yew Valley, which had grown as people moved away from the city center to avoid bombings during the war. Mastapar New Town was created out of land owned by the government, which was formerly a royal hunting reservation. Between Yew Valley and Mastapar New Town is the Mastapar National Laboratory (managed by Dandulena Royal University). Between Simha City and Yew Valley is the Yew River Valley Ordinance Plant, an underground complex built during the war. Also on the line is a hamlet surrounding the old Royal Hunting Lodge, which is abandoned, although still owned by the Red Lion Clan. It is in danger of inundation by the reservoir, in years of high rain.
There is a hydropower plant also in the Yew River Valley, and Mastapar New Town is near the resulting lake. There is a rail yard near Yew Valley that the Q line (and other subways) use.
The background:
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Simha City built MNL mainly to REDACTED. Overtly, among many other REDACTED activities, REDACTED
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Incident: REDACTED
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Eventually, when the party has done a good enough job of investigating that the REDACTED notices, REDACTED
Resources needed: Q line map. REDACTED
Last driver: Warren Punai, a cat, male, aged 38. He does know the tramp, "Old Don Buck-Teeth," a hamster, if he's asked about if he knows anyone riding the train, and volunteer that he hasn't been seeing Old Don lately. He knows the tramp, who often rode the train back and forth all night when it was cold, is a veteran of the Great War with "shell shock" who lives in an encampment/shanty town near the tracks near Mastapar New Town.
"Old Don fought in the war. Like me, but he had a lot worse time of it. Me, I was with Naval Construction, not to say that was easy but Old Don really got into the thick of it. Landed in the first wave at Farplat. He was only ten years older than me, but, by Heaven, you look at him and you'd have thought he was a million years old. We let him ride the train back and forth all night when it gets cold out. He's just got an army surplus tent down in Skell Gulch and I know how cold that must be without an oil stove burning flat out. He's a little jumpy, you know, but he keeps to himself and doesn't cause trouble for the passengers, unlike some of the bums we have to run off."
The train was missing when the day shift driver went to go to it in the yard in the morning.