I think you and I have very different images of the TTE Traisum Cut for the railroad. If I'm reading you correctly, you think they took the debris that fell off the bisected cliff and built a ramp using those debris?
Here's the exact quote from HHNF Prologue:
Most people who saw it from the Karys side for the first time felt a peculiar sense of disorientation. It was something the human eye and the human mind weren’t trained to expect: an absolutely vertical, glassy-smooth cliff over a half-mile high at its shortest point and four and a half miles wide.
The good news was that Karys was outbound from Sharona. That had allowed the Trans-Temporal Express’ construction crews to come at it from the slopes of Mount Karek rather than straight out of the mountain’s heart. The portal was actually located east of the mountain’s crest, which made the impossible cliff several hundred feet shorter from the Karys side and the approach slope perhaps three or four miles shorter from the Traisum side. TTE’s engineers were accustomed to stupendous construction projects fit to dwarf the Grand Ternathian Canal or New Farnal Canal, but this one had been a stretch even for them. It had taken them years (and more tons of dynamite than Kinlafia cared to contemplate) to complete, and all meaningful exploration down-chain from Traisum had been bottlenecked until they’d finally finished it. The cut was five miles long, eighteen hundred feet deep where its Karys terminus met the top of the approach ramp, and wide enough for a four-track right-of-way and a double-wide road for wheeled traffic. The grade, needless to say, was steep.
Now the locomotive chuffed more noisily than ever, laboring as it started into that deep, shadowed gulf of stone. Its smoke plume fumed up, adding its own fresh coat of grime and soot to the stains already marking the cut’s rocky sides, and he heard the haunting beauty of the whistle singing its warning.
My vision of it (based on it being called the Traisum
Cut and Kinlafia telling us they used more tons of dynamite than he cared to think about) is that the TTE blasted out a section of the vertical cliff, making what is effectively a tunnel that's open on one side. So there are no switchbacks and little or no built-up ramp of any kind, just a steeply graded slope cut into the mountain. I admit, I'm not sure what "eighteen hundred feet deep where its Karys terminus met the top of the approach ramp" means; I would guess that there's a small ramp built up from the lower side to the Cut itself, but it's not clear to me.
I should add that they started from the
top of the cliff, so they weren't using any construction materials that were at the
bottom of the cliff, like collapsed rock would be. Nor did they have any real way to support a ramp, which has to be built from the bottom up, not the top down.
If I'm right, any train actually traveling in the Cut is on the Sharonian side of the portal, with all that means to Talents and magic. I've always assumed that there's some kind of cantilevered platform or little house at the top for a Voice to use when sending or receiving messages, but other than that, they probably don't have any way to cross to the Arcanan side of the portal until they reach the bottom, short of leaning over the edge.
PeterZ wrote:Thank you. I did not read that part as carefully as I should have, it seems. I had some trouble envisioning it at first and second read.
The Karys ramp is four miles long. I suspect that was built in large part from the debris from the actual cut. So, artillery could still be set up from the Sharona side and cover the entire ramp into Karys. Those four miles are open to direct fire spells and dragon strafing. Of course artillery at the top of the cut could provide anti-dragon cover.
Unless the Arcanans blew the ramp, the Sharonans could leap frog down the ramp. Mines would take their toll and slow down the process, but the Arcanans couldn't hold the Cut.
Astelon wrote:The cut is described fully in the prologue to HHNF as Darcel approaches and then travels up it. It is five miles long, with an approach ramp in KArys that is four miles long. The grade is steep. No mention of any switchbacks. The cut may be perfectly straight (or close to it), and the description seems to support this. It likely looks more like a long narrow channel through the rock and dirt when viewed from above.
The width of the cut is discussed as: wide enough for a four-track-right-of-way and a double-wide road for wheeled traffic." Can anyone make a guess as to how many feet that might be? Say sixteen for the double wide road, plus the track.
