Eisen stepped into his workshop, grabbing a few materials for himself before he looked over at Constant, "How is the rest of the shipment looking?"
"Girland told me that nearly all the materials for the new meeting room have been delivered to the island," the core helper explained, "According to the proposed schedule, you should get to the island within the next week to begin the preparation and installation of the protective cover. The base structure is currently under construction under Evalia's leadership and is proceeding nicely."
"I see, I'll talk to her later and have her show it to me. What about the iron from the Giants' Country?"
"They apparently started the preparation and ore refinement for the quality of iron you asked for. In two weeks the first part of the shipment should arrive," Constant explained, curiously looking up at the old man, "What is it that you want to build with that anyway?"
Eisen thought about it for a moment, and then looked at the core helper for a few moments, "Have I ever explained to you what a train is?"
"A train? Does it have something to do with becoming stronger for the upcoming battles?"
The old man laughed slightly as he shook his head, "No, not 'training'. A train is... something like a large, automated minecart. We will construct rails across the islands and our country as a whole, and on those rails, we will put a train. The train will pull a number of carriages on those rails as well that we can use to quickly transport materials, items, as well as people."
Constant's eyes widened slightly, "Oh, I see! That sounds really interesting! I can't wait to-"
The core helper soon stopped himself in the middle of the sentence, realizing that what he was about to say would never come true. He would never be able to see the train in action; Constant's movement was fully restrained to this part of the gardens.
"Don't worry," Eisen smiled lightly, "I'll figure out a way to let you see the train once it's finished."
In order to decrease the amount of mana that it would take, instead of creating a faux system-window, Eisen would have the information displayed on a physical crystal screen that the driver could interact with. Inside of the actual carriages, information for what functions the driver needed access to would be added to this panel.
That way, it would be very easy to swap out or add carriages to a train no matter what the model of the locomotive was.
And now that the cab was done, Eisen could move on to the wheels. This was a fairly simple part compared to the cab, especially since most of it was going to be the exact same as a real trains. After figuring out how to connect the axis of these wheels with the gearbox that would be placed above, Eisen really only needed to fine tune the wheels themselves.
So that they could adjust to the curves of the rails properly without derailing all the time, the part of the wheel facing outward was a slight bit smaller than the part facing inward. As if the wheels were a long cone and you removed all the parts that would never come to touch the rails anyway. This way, the wheels would be slightly pushed around to properly adjust to the curves.
And within the actual wheels, Eisen added some other things. He enchanted them to improve the adhesion to the rails.
Usually, he would place something like this on the outside of a wheel, but until now he really only worked with carriages whose wheels would be inspected regularly for damages anyway.
For a train like this, it would be much too risky to allow the enchantments to actually touch the rail directly, so that they could avoid the metal being worn down to a point where the enchantment was damaged to a point of critical failure, which could destroy the whole wheel in the process.
So, instead, though it would decrease the efficiency a bit, Eisen placed the enchantment further within the wheel. It really wasn't much; just a very simple conceptual enchantment that would stop the wheels from potentially sliding over the rails, especially if they were wet or, even worse, frozen. Other trains often carried sand for this, which Eisen would also supply just in case.
If the wheels started sliding over the rails instead of properly gripping them, stopping the train from starting its journey, the sand would be placed onto the rails to provide something for the wheels to actually grip onto for the beginning of the journey.
It wasn't needed that often, and especially with the enchantment it was highly unlikely, but it was better to be prepared for things like this beforehand rather than have to improvise a solution if a moment like this occurred later on.
But with that, Eisen was done planning out the mechanics of the locomotive, and was now ready to begin the actual construction of the most basic prototype.