Side Stories

Self-contained arcs set in the Train World universe, running parallel to the main books. Each follows a non-protagonist character through a bounded experience that doesn’t require knowledge of Elliot’s plot, but exists in the same world, on the same trains, under the same rules.

Purpose

Side stories do three things:

Widen the world. Books One and Two are tight on Elliot’s perspective. Side stories let us inhabit characters who would never be protagonists — a maintenance worker, a kitchen porter, a station-town child — and use their lives to reveal corners of the train that Elliot never reaches.
Deepen the canon. Each side story is allowed to establish small, durable facts about how the world works: the compartmentalisation of maintenance, the rituals of the chit-counter, the way different trades perceive the train. These facts feed back into the reference library so the main books can build on them.
Sit alongside, never against. A side story must be readable by someone who has never read the books, and must not contradict anything established in the books. Where it touches main-plot characters or events, it does so glancingly, from below — the way a maintenance worker hears the Conductor’s footfalls overhead but never sees them.

Principles

These are the rules for writing any side story in this universe.

1. Not a thriller

Side stories are quieter than the main books. They do not have action climaxes. The Pratchett mode is the default mode — precise observation, compassion under cynicism, the impossible treated as mundane infrastructure. If the protagonist has a problem, it is usually a professional problem — a junction that won’t behave, a recipe that’s gone wrong, a passenger who keeps misplacing their ticket.

2. Bounded scope

Each side story is self-contained. No cliffhangers. No “to be continued.” If a side-story character recurs, they do so as a minor presence in another story, not as the lead of a sequel. Side stories don’t have arcs that require resolution in another piece of work.

3. End without complete answers

The world has structural mysteries (the engine, the Passage, the tracks, who built any of it). Side stories are allowed — encouraged — to brush against those mysteries from oblique angles. They are not allowed to solve them. The main books own the answers, where there are answers. A side story’s job is to add a question, not retire one.

4. POV is whoever lives there

The narrative voice is third person close to the side-story protagonist, with the same Pratchett pull-back as the main books. But the register shifts to fit the character. Mira (maintenance) thinks in pivots and pressures; a kitchen porter would think in rotations and stock; a station-town child would think in arrivals and weather. The narrator’s eye for absurdity stays constant; the character’s vocabulary doesn’t.

5. Every detail does two jobs

Same rule as the main books. World-building emerges from the protagonist’s working life, not from exposition. If a side story explains how the chit-counter works, it does so because the protagonist has gone to the chit-counter, not because the reader needs a primer.

6. The main cast is welcome, and so is the discipline

Elliot, Mr Fixer, Mr Plum, Birdie, the Conductor, Albion, Sable and the rest may appear in side stories, as leads or in passing. (This replaces the old no-crossover rule, retired after Loop-Day*.)* The earlier stories kept them off-page by choice, and a story told from below or outside may still do that. When the main cast does appear, the following apply:

Pin the placement. Give the story a place on timeline and a reader-ledger in reveals, and make sure the characters know only what they know at that point.
Don’t move the main arc. A side story may deepen a relationship or add a custom. It may not deliver a reveal, change someone’s status, or settle anything a book is waiting to settle.
Voices as in the books. Read the character’s block in voices first. Log anything durable (dates, objects, habits) in canon-notes.md so the books can use it.

Architectural Role

Side stories feed back into the world bible. Anything canonical established in a side story — a location, a minor character, a rule of how something works — is added to the relevant reference file:

locations.md — new places the side story has named
characters.md — minor characters introduced (always tagged as side-story origin)
rules.md — any new mechanism or social rule the story establishes
UNIVERSE.md — only for thematic additions of structural significance

The rule is: if a future book or side story would benefit from knowing this fact, it goes in the canon files. If it’s a one-off detail with no implications beyond the story, it stays in the story.

See canon-notes.md in this folder for the running record of what each side story has contributed.

Current Arcs

Dead Letters (complete)

File: dead-letters.md
Protagonist: Pip, with Jem, the message-running siblings from Carriage 74
Premise: A routine delivery to the First Carriages reveals that the recipient has been dead for four days while his account continues to pay for meals. Jem and Pip carry the undeliverable sealed letter home and argue over whether knowing they are excluded from the truth gives them the right to open it.
What it touches: institutional silence, class geography, runners as overlooked intermediaries, withholding as both courtesy and control.
What it adds to canon: see canon-notes.md.

What Powers the Train (complete)

File: what-powers-the-train.md
Protagonist: Mira, a maintenance worker on The Meridian
Premise: Mira clears blockages in the service tunnels beneath the carriage floors. A junction at Carriage 38 has been rattling for three weeks. Over time she maps the cause to a duct that runs forward of her authorisation — into the tunnels nobody on her crew is supposed to enter, toward the engine carriages nobody has ever seen the inside of.
What it touches: the engine mystery, the structural ignorance built into the train’s hierarchy, the chit economy as it operates two layers below the visible carriage life.
What it adds to canon: see canon-notes.md.

The Station Keeper (complete)

File: the-station-keeper.md
Protagonist: Ilsa Brae, keeper of the resupply halt at Tarnhalt — a civil servant of a small polity, not a romantic grounder-outlaw
Premise: The whole story is told from outside the train, across a single ≈14-month loop: the Meridian stops for four hours, takes on water and coal, and leaves; Ilsa lives the months between. Her real office is the books — every loop she countersigns the train’s declared freight manifest against her own car-tally. This loop a single line has quietly vanished from the manifest — a bonded, sealed, through-carried, nil-tariff consignment that’s ridden second-from-the-foot for a hundred years, always the same weight to the ounce — omitted, not deleted, the totals re-footed clean. She can prove a record changed; she can never prove what the car holds. Fourteen months later the line is restored, footing perfectly, making her one duplicate the error.
What it touches: the inversion of the worldbuilding lens (the train as tide/visitor/weather); the engine mystery from the one angle that can measure it (the keeper who loads everything the train takes and knows none of it could move the train); records curated by a faceless, patient, structural hand; survival-incuriosity as governance; the dignity of keeping an honest record you cannot explain.
What it adds to canon: see canon-notes.md.

The Alighting (complete)

File: the-alighting.md
Protagonist: Teff, a Meridian hauler put off the train at the station town of Bauch’s Crossing
Premise: Told entirely from outside the train (after The Station Keeper’s inversion, but from the POV of the expelled). Teff lost his bunk of eleven years to a paper reassignment, was right by custom and wrong by paper, and his real offence became his inability to accept the ruling. The story follows the forty minutes before the Meridian leaves Bauch’s Crossing — Teff on the platform beside the stopped train he can no longer board — and the three hours after it pulls away, as he begins to understand that the train was the only context his life ever made sense in, and that this is where he lives now.
What it touches: the train seen from outside as vast and indifferent; the system working exactly as advertised (no villain, no injustice — that’s the horror); land-sickness (a body grieving on ground that won’t move); the “don’t look back” rule re-read from the platform; being recorded by a receiving town as a small redemption.
What it adds to canon: see canon-notes.md.

The Tap Test (complete)

File: the-tap-test.md
Protagonist: Marisa, the patissier of Book One, a loop and a quarter after the concert (~Year 1.5)
Premise: The Conductor’s Office has over-corrected: Standing Order 212 requires every piece of hollow sugar-work going forward to be sounded with a spoon, weighed against its recipe and initialled by the new Inspector of Confectionery, Oswin Dray, a retired enforcer who takes the post with total seriousness. First Carriage hosts, unwilling to have their desserts sounded like bulkheads, go over to solid sponge, and the craft starts to die. Then the Office commissions its own anniversary centrepiece: a replica of the empty stand where the gramophone stood. Test, joke or trap? Marisa builds it hollow, declares it, and shows it, with one corner of the velvet turned back so you can see all the way through. She asks to have it sounded even though the Order doesn’t cover it.
What it touches: an institution learning exactly the wrong lesson; hollowness vs. concealment (sounding tells you there is room, not what the room is for); a craft passed hand to hand; the Plum → custodian → Marisa lineage, touched only through a gesture.
What it adds to canon: see canon-notes.md.

Loop-Day (complete)

File: loop-day.md
Protagonist: Elliot, ~Year 1.2 (the quiet stretch after Book Two, before Book Four)
Premise: The arrived have no birthdays, so carriages keep the day a person was found, counted in loops. Carriage 74 throws Elliot his first loop-day with no budget. Fixer, barred by his own rule one from knowing anything about him, scrounges a gift by observation and gets it wrong. It is a First Carriages cigarette case for a man who doesn’t smoke, but it is exactly the weight of the phone Elliot’s hand still pats for. Plum makes a card from a broken fiddle string wound into one loop. The cake comes by favours nobody explains. Seventy-three days earlier Elliot kept his real Bristol birthday alone, because the date was one more thread of the secret. At the end of the night, in the coupling between 68 and 69, he gives Fixer and Plum the date and what it used to mean. It costs him nothing, and it feels like something.
What it touches: two calendars drifting apart (12 against 14 months, realigning after 7 years); the finding-story as the arrived’s birth-story; rule one making gift-giving an intelligence operation; the secret as something made of small unsecret things.
Main cast on the page. This is the first side story with Elliot, Fixer and Plum as leads, and the reason the old no-crossover rule was retired (see Principle 6). Reader-ledger: end of Book Two, with no Passage mechanics or cosmology.
What it adds to canon: see canon-notes.md.

The Tide-Bell (complete)

File: the-tide-bell.md
Protagonist: Hobb Lunn, ringer of the tide-bell at Coldmere (~Year 1.5, before Book Seven)
Premise: Coldmere faces an emptiness, calls its loading-yard the harbour, and pays one ringer four chits a loop to ring a bell at high water from a card of tides that is recopied every nineteen years and that nobody living understands. A clerk from the Conductor’s Office schedules desk comes down during the two-hour stop to tell him in person that the line has been struck for want of a stated purpose. In the bell-house interview, every answer to “what is the bell for?” is a different, sincere civic function: the night-watch, the first oven, the children’s curfew, the funerals carried out “on the ebb”. Lunn’s defence is the boots theory of time: take the tide out and the town will have to invent a time, and it will be worse. The line cannot be unstruck. The clerk files High water and a query for next loop, and the bell rings anyway.
What it touches: an institution keeping a word it no longer understands (and the Office doing the same with its own schedule); fairness that exists because nobody chose it; fossil vocabulary, with nothing explained.
What it adds to canon: see canon-notes.md.

Above Stairs (complete)

File: above-stairs.md
Protagonist: Sorel, a train-born lady’s maid in the upper quarters of Carriage 6 (~Year 1.5–1.7)
Premise: The First Carriages’ two-storey quarters seen from the service side. Sorel’s widow, Mrs Ferrers (arrived, forty-two years aboard, the most correct woman on the corridor), begins describing a childhood she cannot have had, warmly and completely, and then orders her maid to ask her something. On her day out Sorel goes home to Carriage 74, where her gran gets things wrong and the whole bay corrects her at volume: in 74 they correct you because that is how they keep you; above stairs nobody corrects anybody, because that is how they keep their places. At the Thursday at-home, when the pear tree comes out in company, Sorel breaks the first rule of service and asks a question, turning a memory into a much-told parlour story. The widow’s details keep getting smaller and more exact, and the last one (a cup of milk left full all night on a staircase that stood still) is a thing no stair on the Meridian could do. Sorel decides to keep the story either way.
What it touches: the stairwell as chokepoint; invisible labour that makes the hush; the cardinal manner seen from the side that enforces it; findings as the arrived’s kept childhood, and the First Carriages’ refusal to tell them; correction as care.
What it adds to canon: see canon-notes.md.

Head Forward (complete)

File: head-forward.md
Protagonist: Tam Ferrier, train-born stockwoman of the Meridian’s three stock carriages, twenty-three years in post (~Year 1.3)
Premise: Once a loop the stock carriages walk the train’s meat forward to the kitchens under Standing Requisition 41: forty birds, six animals. Tam has filled it to the bird nineteen times by running the whole farm backwards from draft-day. This loop the hatch has failed in the mountain cold. She has thirty-nine named hens she won’t send, Greer’s goat Margaret, whom nobody sends, and Duchess, a sow protected by clause nine of the farm warrant. Ossie Venn proposes pigeons (“It says birds”). On the night before the draft, a signal hold stops the train for eighteen minutes in the middle of nowhere, and in the quiet every animal that was lying tail to the front gets up and turns to face forward: goats, hens and the sow alike. Nobody has ever seen it, because at station stops the stock carriages are bedlam. Each ordinary reason (wind, warmth, feed, sound) works for one carriage and none works for Duchess. Old Hesk offers his gran’s saying, when the wheels stand, the stock heads forward, which everybody knows means “walk your draft at a stop.” Tam sends a short draft and an honest slip, finds the kitchens’ receipt book is pre-printed forty and six, and tells the kitchen nothing. In her own stock book she writes cause not known.
What it touches: naming as care and as cost; an honest count nobody counts (the printed receipt beside Ilsa’s ledger and Mossop’s stair book); seeing only what a stopped train lets you see; forward/warm from the very back of the train; the withholding etiquette taken up by a woman who has just found she has something to withhold.
What it adds to canon: see canon-notes.md.

Forty-Three Minutes at Halverston (complete)

File: forty-three-minutes-at-halverston.md
Protagonist: Elliot, ~Year 2.5 (after Book Three, before Book Seven), during one Halverston stop on the autumn run
Premise: The Gazette’s wet station town, its forty-three minutes, and the people who wait on the platform. The Office card on every door says don’t engage. Elliot goes down for eleven samosas and sits instead on the spare stool beside Nan Corwen, who got off the Meridian nineteen loops ago “to wait” for a man with a bad knee and a green coat, always late, whose face she cannot supply. The waiters keep their own etiquette: a tea rota with a borrowed urn, hand-lettered boards that describe and never name, you look, you don’t run, and above all never saying another waiter’s person’s name. Elliot may be the only man aboard who can guess what they are waiting for, and every shape of the answer is either a sealed truth or no comfort. He doesn’t tell her about the Passage. He tells her one small thing: where he came from, people wait at the places people come in, holding up boards like hers. Mrs Lalita Brack, the samosa woman, has priced the waiting into her business (four kept back at minute forty, “the waiting price”) and sells Elliot his silence a samosa at a time. She also tells him about Margery Toft and the man off Twelve. Nan gives him the name, which the page never gives. Plum is on the step of 47: “You were late.” Elliot finds he has been watching the doors for three years.
What it touches: mercy against truth (withholding as the train’s grace and the machine’s method); the arrivals hall reinvented on a platform; names that wear thin when said; Elliot’s own short list and the sum he will not do; commerce as care (Brack’s standing offer, never claimed).
Main cast on the page. Elliot leads, with Fixer at the start and Plum at the end. Reader-ledger: end of Book Three, using nothing beyond Book Two. The waiting is never confirmed (someone who died later and came through elsewhere, someone who never came, or someone who never was).
What it adds to canon: see canon-notes.md.

Future Arcs (placeholder)

Candidate side stories that would fit the architecture. Not commissioned — listed here so that when they’re written, they fit the existing shape rather than reinventing it.

A station-town arc: a child or worker in one of the resupply towns experiences a single train stop. (Realised as The Station Keeper (Ilsa Brae at Tarnhalt) and, from the platform, as Forty-Three Minutes at Halverston*. A further station-town arc is still welcome from a different angle, e.g. a child rather than a keeper.)*
A farm carriage arc: a livestock worker discovers something about an animal that suggests the farm carriages are stranger than anyone has noticed. (Realised as Head Forward (Tam Ferrier, the stock carriages). The crop carriages are still unvisited.)
A patisserie arc (the aftermath is now realised as The Tap Test*; the prequel below is still open)*: prequel-adjacent. The patisserie’s assistant, before the events of Book One. (Note: must not spoil or pre-empt Book One’s reveal.)
A grounder arc: a person who lives off-train, watching the trains pass, with their own theory about what they are.

These are sketches, not commitments. Any future side story should be checked against the principles above before being written.