006: Paddington Station
Originally accessed by horse from the Blue Roof Inn, and up until the Western Railway was about halfway done, by which point there was a footpath laid that was being converted to rail, Paddington was originally built as a nameless far Western waystation for access to the village beyond. It was slapped together out of cobblestone because that’s what I had the most of ready to hand. It also meant fewer slots used in my carrying capacity, by reducing the variety of materials needed. There’s a lot of foot trails and bridges and stairways in the region, as I used this station for extensive resource exploitation. There’s mineworks throughout the land the station is sitting on, well up into the mountains (and below them) to the north, and south all the way down to where the Grand Concourse emerges out the side of the mountain and looks out to sea. Paddington was the construction shack for the Grand Concourse, which was the first broad-railbed rail line in this gameworld, built to drive through a mountain to the sea and support mining of the range. Someday I may extend the Grand Concourse to fill in more of the southern map, like I’m doing with the Bee Line right now, paralleling the Great Southern. Don’t bother looking for the Bee Line right now, this is the first time I’ve mentioned it. Enough with the tangent, let’s get on with this.
Eventually, I needed to give it a name, and the real Paddington is the anchor of the Great Western Railway and its successors, and has such a great Victorian cast-iron train shed, designed by Brunel himself. I’ve not got that sort of talent to begin with, and haven’t put that kind of effort into any of my stations thus far, although I suppose at some point I should try something that’s at least crenellated. For now, you’re going to have to be satisfied with the row of redstone lamps alternating with the redstone torches that are powering them. This was an early attempt at using redstone lamps; I learned to hide a block of redstone in the wall behind the lamp later on. I’ve been thinking about a multiple-room station, with redstone lamps on either side of the wall to hide the power source entirely.
The interior layout is pretty standard, although there’s no crafting chest between the crafting table and the footwarmer, and the blast furnace is on the bed side instead of back past the storage row. This resulted in a very nonstandard arrangement of chest usage. Finding anything in here is a beast nowadays but I just haven’t had the time or interest to reorganize it. Paddington is now the transfer point between the narrow gauge Western Line, the Grand Concourse, and the broad-railbed Great Southern Railway, and more about all those forthwith.
