The Rails of Westeros (RAR!)

[Zor]

One day, shortly after the destruction of the Greyjoy Rebellion, Westeros is met by a set of strangers who arrive in Kings' Landing from parts unknown in five huge iron ships bearing a strange tricolor flag of Blue, White and Red and emitting smoke as they went.



After they drop anchor and disembark they request an audience with the king. Their leader is one Victor de Vapeur who offers king Robert a novel little device as a gift, a small little mechanical contrivance about 20 centimeters long on wheels which goes around a small metal track by burning spirituous liquor to boil water to work pistons that turn the wheels. He then explains that this is but a miniature model to illustrate the operation of his pride and joy. Which he takes the king aboard his ship to behold several of these...



Then, after plying King Robert with some excellent wines, monsieur de Vapeur and his clerks present him with his offer: he wants to build sets of steel tracks across all of Westeros on which his mighty Locomotives would run drawing huge trains. He proposes setting up a line which runs from King's landing West to Lannisport then Branching in two: one branch going to Riverrun the other going south to Highgarden and Oldtown. Another one which would run North to Winterfell with three branches coming off it: one which goes to Eirye and Gulltown, another that would go Riverrun and yet another up north which goes to White Harbor. One would go due south past storms end and onto Sunspear and Dorne. In exchange for the King's assistance in it's construction in the form of labor and the creation of House de Vapeur of Steam and the Iron Road, the Iron Throne shall get a Tariff of 20% of all income on freight and passengers and his own special train specifically for the royal family and their entourage, which will carry them across the landscape in comfort and peace. Once these are completed a similar arrangement would be made for branch lines in each of the individual kingdoms, with ten percent of the profits going to the ruling houses and ten percent going to the crown. More rails shall be provided from the foreign lands from which de Vapeur and his associates come from will also set up a mill for the production of more rails near King's Landing.

King Robert agrees and the project is soon under way. Victor soon after provides some inquiring Maesters with some information about Steam Engines and has his engineers show them about his locomotives and his new steamworks, foundries and rail mills as they go up to make rails, replacement parts and ultimately new locomotives. Confident in the fact that this has earned their goodwill and that they will be unable to build anything which could come close to his fleet of locomotives without his assistance within his lifetime.

A similar fleet arrives in Braavos headed by one Dieter von Dampfdorf and offers the Sealord a similar deal.

How does this Iron Road affect the Game of Thrones?

Zor

[FaxModem1]

King Robert introduces Train Jousting to the next tournament.

Seriously though, food harvesting will be a lot quicker, as it will get from point A to point B a lot quicker, factories will start springing up, and Westeros is going to experience an industrial revolution. This means that the cities are going to grow in population, and farming capacity should increase. This might mean, due to their increased production, that Westeros might not have to worry about the hard starvation during the long winter.

[Purple]

And several centuries down the line when man induced global warming becomes a serious thing this guy becomes elevated to godhood for the act of abolishing winter.

[LaCroix]

It would take until long after Robert died of old age to get the infrastructure for railroad running, I'd guess.

They first need to build steam engines to create mines to get the raw materials to build factories to make steam engines and tools to build a foundry to build more foundries to start producing rails.

At least in our world, rail transport was already a thing for a good 3-400 years when the steam engine came to be, but I never heard of metal rails anywhere in westeros. For all we know they still carry ore on mules. And even though rails were common, it took until 1825 (a good 20 years after the locomotive was invented, and 12 years after the first well-working locomotives) for a functioning railroad to be implemented.

You'd probably have to uplift the whole continent for like 20 to 30 years to get a functional industry going and start laying the first conventional rail.
And that would most likely run from whereever the coal and iron is mined to the foundries.

If they don't run out of material, money and the will to continue when the next winter hits.

[Purple]

Not nesecerily. Whilst there would certainly not be the kind of super large impact FaxModem1 envisioned I imagine that as you said mines and foundries would get connected in short order. This in turn would lead to cheaper steel and coal production and thus an overall rise in the standard of living as well as military equipment quality. So the impact will be noticeable. And I can perfectly see that even though a proper complete rail network might not get built in the near time frame some massive prestige projects like those described in the OP might well get done.

[FaxModem1]

Steam engines are going to be something available in Westeros. Imagine the maesters rolling out the tractor and how that will impact farms. The work of a 100 men over a week could be done in a day. King Robert is an idiot, but Jon Arryn will definitely of the increased revenue and food production that will be possible through this.

[Sea Skimmer]

It'd be impossible to build anything of length without a large enabling industrial base that simply doesn't exist. The materials and labor won't exist or will be far too expensive. The locomotive engines will probably end up powering cranes to load and unload ships with. Railroads took centuries to go from simple wooden tracks to the earliest steam trains in real life for a damn lot of reasons you can't shortcut on any useful scale.

[LaCroix]

Tractors will be the last thing they implement, I'd presume - they need a steam engine that is compact enough but powerful enough to pull a plow, light enough to not dig itself in (or you'll need an even bigger tractor to pull it out again), but that allows operation in the worst possible environment for a steam engine, and by relative laymen (for someone able to troubleshoot and repair that thing is to valuable to have him sitting at a field operating it)

And just so you know- I'm talking about traction engines - mobile winches that pull the plow via cable. Real tractors are not really possible with steam engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_engine

It took very long to create the first working tractor long after trains were already rolling on their tracks. (Especially since you most likely need a train to take that friggin' thing to where it is needed.)

Much more efficent using the engine at a fixed location with proper (filtered) water supply and coal delivered, hauling huge loads for ships or mines. And later, once the first tracks are laid, transporting raw materials by train.

edit:

I just saw that the ship people are promising to supply Westeros with pre-built trains and rails. In that case, we'll see the realm bankrupt pretty soon, for the ship guys will gobble up all the gold still in circulation. Also, it would not allow any up-lifting in mass, for they would be incapable of reverse-engineering said engines without the proper tools.

[Simon_Jester]

So if these guys are volunteering to provide the rails and engines themselves... where do THEY get them from?

It would take until long after Robert died of old age to get the infrastructure for railroad running, I'd guess.

They first need to build steam engines to create mines to get the raw materials to build factories to make steam engines and tools to build a foundry to build more foundries to start producing rails.

At least in our world, rail transport was already a thing for a good 3-400 years when the steam engine came to be, but I never heard of metal rails anywhere in westeros. For all we know they still carry ore on mules.

The overall technical level appears to be High Middle Ages so I suspect rail-carts are actually used in the mines themselves in some places, but they'd be stone or wooden or at most iron strap rails. The technology to mass produce metal rails wouldn't be available.

Steam engines are going to be something available in Westeros. Imagine the maesters rolling out the tractor and how that will impact farms. The work of a 100 men over a week could be done in a day. King Robert is an idiot, but Jon Arryn will definitely of the increased revenue and food production that will be possible through this.

Thing is, while yes there are huge advantages to this technology, there's a catch.

Steam technology and mechanization appeared in Britain (and elsewhere) in societies that had spent basically the entire 1600s and 1700s building up their production of iron to levels seldom if ever seen before in the world. To produce a major burst of industrialization like that, you really, really need mass production of iron. You also need precision iron-working; foundries as distinct from the "village blacksmith" level of production we see common in Westeros.

Historically one of the big things that helped with that was cannon-makers, who had been working iron and bronze on a large scale to make (fairly) precisely shaped artillery pieces for a long time. Westeros has nothing like that.

Basically, there's a good reason why when societies with purely traditional means of production (i.e. China and feudal Japan) tried to industrialize, they were unable to build their own railroads and locomotives for decades. You need not only large production of the needed goods, but also concentrated production that can be adapted to create precision metalwork.

[Cykeisme]

I chuckled at the first two responses from FaxModem1 and Purple, this is why I love sd.net.

An industrial revolution in Westeros is an interesting idea, and something that I thought about while reading the books. Despite the frequent internecine warfare in the Seven Kingdoms, does anyone else find it strange that there hasn't been more technological development in the last few centuries?
Note that, unlike the medieval stage of our real world, they also have the Maesters who focus on thinking and knowledge, which would seem to make the the technological stasis even stranger.


Anyway, regarding the railways discussed on this thread, basically the required developments to build infrastructure that's required to build the next lot of infrastructure, which is required to build the next lot of infrastructure, is going to take more than a single lifetime, right?


I vaguely recall reading an essay, written by Mike Wong I believe, explaining how developments need to have the prerequisite developments to be in place first, and so forth, before reaching a given level of development. Applicable both to "primitive civilizations reaching our modern level", and also to "our modern level reaching a futuristic level".
An important point was that having complete knowledge of all the scientific and engineering principles is not enough; each successive level of supporting technologies and infrastructure must be built before the next.

While looking for it, I've started started re-reading a lot of the excellent essays on the site, but haven't come across the one I'm looking for. Does anyone know what I'm referring to, if it exists?