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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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. No protagonist crossover

Elliot does not appear in side stories. Mr Fixer, Mr Plum, the Conductor, Albion, Sable — none of them appear directly. They can be referenced obliquely (the cobbler who repairs Albion’s boots; the clerk who limps; the carriage where the Conductor was once seen) but they do not interact with side-story protagonists. This keeps each side story portable and prevents accidental contradictions with the books.

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.

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. 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.
  • A patisserie arc: 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.