The first journey from New Crobuzon. A team: engineers, gendarmes, scholars and rugged scouts who had looked at long-haired Judah with friendly condescension. They started two, three miles west of New Crobuzon, under heavy guard. A flatbed town carved out of the land, a range of buffers, a fan of rails.

Warehouses big enough to hold ships, mountains of gravel, planks from stripcutting Rudewood. A mob of humans and cactacae; khepri, their scarab heads fidgetsome; vodyanoi in the canals that linked to the city, crewing open-bottomed barges; rarer races. A garden of different limbs. Cheap deals, contracts, assignations. The Remade were corralled, shovelled like meat animals onto barred trucks. And on into the empty land, skirting the edges of the forest through cuts blasted with blackpowder, went the railroad.

It was late spring. Dirigibles puttered overhead, sweep-surveying the landscape, tracking the iron way. At the train window Judah watched the wilderness.

The train was full with recruits: labourers on wood benches, the prison-trucks of the Remade. Judah sat with other surveyors. He listened to the pistons. The squat, simple trains within New Crobuzon were always accelerating or slowing, only ever jerking between stations. There was no time for them to pick up pace, to maintain it and create this new sound, this utterly new beat of a speeding train.

They passed a village: an odd and ugly sight. Sidings slid toward it, and Judah could see the original wattle-and-daub dwellings alongside rapidly thrown-up wood houses. It must have trebled in size within a year.

-Frenzy, said one man. -Can’t last. They’ll be crying within two years. Every piece-of-shit town we pass gives the railroad money, or some syndicate from New Crobuzon comes down, takes it over, pays Wrightby’s railroad so’s they get the damn rails. They can’t all make it. Some towns are going to die.

-Or be killed, another said, and they laughed. -Before we even broke ground they started building. There’s a township to the west, Salve, built by men from Wrightby’s own Transcontinental Railroad Trust, if you please. They drew up the plans for this Myrshock-Cobsea route with Iron Wright hisself, got their town ready for him. From nothing. A halfway place before the swamp junction.

-Only there was some shenanigans, Jabber knows what, and Iron Wright isn’t talking to them. So now we’ll be skirting away and no iron road’s coming to Salve. The men laughed. -Still there. Still modern. Cold-dead empty. The youngest ghost-town in Rohagi.

Judah imagined music halls, a bathhouse, visited only by dust, eaten by creepers.