the OXline
“Wind against the goggles. Cool night air against her cheeks. She roars on into the night, hissing and clanking and smoking. She heads toward the glow of the big city, with sparks trailing behind her like dying moths.” — Shawn P. McCarthy
The Oxline is the unrelenting spread of progress and capitalism across the wastes, creeping across the wasteland like a spider’s web. A network of refurbished rail lines, new construction, and business dealings with the powerful and elite of a number of notable settlements, the Oxline brings trade and connection to those that can afford it’s services.
The new Railroad Conglomerate (or RRC) was originally the result of a forced buyout and merger of the Railroad Commission (a Pureblood land holdings company that rose to claim the land’s natural resources after the Hiway War) and the Conglomerate (an academic Digitarian technocracy) orchestrated by Arthur Lovelace. The RRC was once the seat of geographic, technological, and financial power in the San Saba and leveraged that power to fulfill their objectives. Although The Chairman was deposed during the War of Antlers, the faction has survived, bloody but unbroken.
The influence of the RRC has stagnated as they have reduced their attention to the network of Oxlines near the town of Bravado. As “safer” travel options dwindle, the world seems to grow further apart every day as the faction struggles to maintain the rail lines. With each rail tie and spike salvaged or stolen by raiders, the RRC struggles to bring new resources and connections into the sleepy town of Bravado and beyond.
The jewel of the Railroad Conglomerate is the OX itself. While the RRC has a dwindling number of other locomotives they have built and maintained over the last 5 years, none approach the speed, majesty, and technological prowess of the Ox. Original built by the genius inventor Samuel Sung, the Ox incorporates a massive jet engine into its frame, hooked to a powerful Oxblood boiler and reinforced with a frame of the oldcestor alloy metal drawn from below the ground in tiny Bravado.
The history of the Ox is as venerable as its many journeys across the wastes. It has weathered terrorist attacks in the Clutch, survived the collapse of the Devil’s Gorge bridge, ran through hordes of zed and raiders alike, and was even used to run over an ARCHON and send it screaming back into the Abyss. The wheels of progress churn ever forward for the Ox, and the motto of the RRC has always proved true: