A train that takes a curve faster than its chord allows does not turn; it leaves the iron. I have buried enough wheels at Hollowfast to hold that as law. So when the proving run through the Mere began to throw its body off the line at the start of every session, I did not blame the driver. I set the speed to the curve, within the turning the core can hold, and not the curve to my impatience.
Two more mendings followed. The incidental surface under the run, the little ground that is only there so the eye has a floor, was kept small, its larger volume left as drawn. And the stopping marks at each waypoint were made to grow and shrink with the size of the scene, because a mark that suits a siding of thirty paces will never be reached on a yard of three thousand.
Late in the night, two further yards were given entry gates for the proving player, one on each of the other two platforms, for the backdrop run. A gate is not a train. Nothing here is laid until I watch it roll on its own iron, on its own day, and none of it was watched this day.