Thomas the Blood-Engine

Engine powered by Brijild fuel (extracted from Brijild blood). From there it operates mostly mechanically.

Features making it harder to attack include:

- Internal enlargement. The majority of its carriages are bigger on the inside than the outside thanks to various bullfuckery that went into its creation and later modifications. How to make rooms bigger on the inside is known, why the methods with which it's achieved work aren't, and said methods usually require certain artifacts or the biological parts of certain - usually ridiculously difficult to kill - creatures. Being bigger on the inside enables this train to hold a larger amount of soldiers who can be used for its defense at any time, as well as host internal defenses that otherwise wouldn't be able to fit inside.

- Its speed combined with it being able to come to a full stop in under 10 seconds.

- Various trained aerial creatures, primarily hoglats. Their nests are located throughout the train, and hoglats are pretty much always willing to fight to the death to defend their nests.

- Watchtowers atop many of the carriages, containing both long-ranged weapons and lookouts possessing incredible eyesight either due to being members of the Visby magic family or having gone through the Vighsby ritual (gives incredible eyesight like that of the Visbys but also gives you eye cancer, so you'll have to have your eyes removed and go blind in a few years). There are also battlements between these towers. The towers are made of leviathan bone and firmly attached to the train. These have led to some calling it the fortress train.

- There's no disconnecting carriages. They're connected with a continuous chain running underneath them made of a metal I forgot the name of but it's this setting's obligatory "oh my god that metal is so stupidly strong" metal. The chain is also ridiculously heavy, cos the metal in question is so stupidly heavy that only Tummens and other strength-enhanced people can effectively use equipment made of it. So you can completely obliterate a carriage but the chain will still be there and as a result the train unaffected.

- Lots of mounted ballistae. Great for taking out any siege equipment aimed at the train or its tracks.

- Off-track functionality. Yes: this train can go off the tracks, keep moving and go back onto them later on if it's necessary, such as due to part of the tracks being compromised. This is only done when necessary however as it damages the train, isn't as fast and burns through its Brijild fuel quite quickly.

- The front carriage of the train consists more of what is essentially a battering ram than the engine that powers the train. It's also equipped with a snow plow.

- Cognito-influencing drape-banners that can be allowed to unfurl across the sides of the train. These include ones that induce positive emotions for when passing through loyalist areas and ones that induce emotions like fear and tiredness when passing through separatist or otherwise disloyal places. Currently cognito-influencers aren't very well understood and so these banners only have slight effects, with attempts at recreating symbols that had overwhelming effects when/where they were found often only having a tiny fraction of the effect. Why they work is also unknown... there are a lot of cases of things being used but not understood.

- The leviathan bone used is thick and leviathan bone itself is a very strong material.

- Several bio-portals. In case you're wondering why not just use portals instead of a train, the bio-portals need to be physically connected as parts of the same organism, and aren't so much portals as highly controlled cases of space being compressed and stretched within a creature. Bio-portal organisms naturally live symbiotically with various mega-hive species, and/or are themselves made by mega-hives, being provided food in return for making travel around mega-hives easier. Due to how these portals function, yes you can see what's on the other side when looking into them, and if you tried to walk into one while someone else was walking through the other side you'd just bump into each other, not fuse or anything wacky like that.

- All land for half a mile either side is Crown property. Watchtowers have been erected across most of the way, doubling as stations for those tasked with maintaining the tracks, although in practice these wouldn't be able to do much except send a swarm of yeller-hawks with warnings of danger to the train and any nearby Crown-owned forts and hope at least one of them isn't shot down.

Communication through the train is achieved primarily with yeller-hawks. Give a mimic-hawk a different piece of food depending on which carriage you want it to deliver a message to and then just say what you want it to say. If you want it to deliver a written message, give it a written message and it will bring it to the captain of that carriage, who can then give it to whoever in that carriage needs it. They can do both at the same time.

These hawks aren't in danger when moving between carriages as they fly through an internally-enlarged (by similar means to the carriages themselves) tube, protected from outside interference. This tube does have bio-portals along its lining to further speed up the journeys up and down the train of these hawks.

Aside from that is a network of strings and bells