A Brief History of Railroading in the Shire

(Last revised 10/10/2004)

After the destruction of the necromancer Sauron in the great War of the Rings (see J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Trilogy,) Frodo Baggins' companion Samwise Gamgee returned with Frodo's cousins Meriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrin Took to the Shire. A period of relative peace and prosperity descended upon Middle Earth. It's true that there were still a few goblins, orcs, trolls, and even the occasional dragon roaming the wilder parts of the land, but the men, the elves, the dwarves, and of course the hobbits controlled most of the land and kept it safe for decent folk.

All vestiges of the reign of the ruffian men who controlled Hobbiton during the war and of the Battle of Bywater when the hobbits regained control of Hobbiton were erased. When Frodo and his uncle Bilbo sailed with Gandalf into the Western Sea, Frodo left all he owned to Sam. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins acquired Bag End when Bilbo left Hobbiton to live in Rivendell, but she and her family decided to return to their former home in Hardbottle after the war. Sam used part of his inheritance to buy Bag End. There he settled with his wife, the former Rose Cotton , and his daughter Elanor expecting a quiet life without any further adventures.

Over the next thirty years or so, Hobbiton slowly became a commercial center for the Shire. Sometime before sailing into the West, Gandalf had taught an aspiring wizard named Billington how to make fireworks. Now Billington opened the Gandalf Fireworks Factory in Hobbiton. Peregrin Took opened Took Mercantile. The hobbits began to feel more comfortable about their human and other neighbors in Middle Earth and to permit them to enter the Shire. Trade sprang up. The appearance of many small businesses produced a new market for lumber in Hobbiton, Sackville, Buckland, and the other hamlets of the Shire, and Sam started a lumber company to supply that market. Sam had spent the first few years after returning to Hobbiton replanting many of the trees that had been destroyed during the Bad Times by Sharkey (Saruman) and his ruffians. The lumber operation remained small because he wanted to make sure that the forest around the Shire would not be destroyed through over-harvesting. They cut small amounts of timber in Bindbole Wood and the Green-Hill Country. The timber was hand-sawn into lumber and moved by pony cart to the villages of the Shire.

At about this time, Gimli son of Gloin came for a visit to Bag End. Sam was glad to see his old friend, and there was a bit of bustle while Sam got the dwarf seated at the table with a pot of hot tea and a large plate of cakes. Sam and Rose's youngest, little Goldilocks, perched on Gimli's knee and amused herself by hiding in his long beard.

"Well, Master Gamgee," Gimli said around a mouthful of excellent beetle-berry cake, "you've done quite well for yourself."

"Oh, yes," Sam replied. "It's a good life with Rose and the children. I must say, though, it's nothing like the days of the Great Danger. And I'm glad it's not! But sometimes things do seem very quiet here at Bag End."

"What you need is an adventure, a challenge! Oh, nothing so grand or desperate as following Frodo Baggins to Mount Doom, but something to keep the mind and body nimble. You know, of course, that we dwarves have taken Moria back from the orcs and reopened the mines there? No? Well, indeed we have. But there are not many folks living nearby. It's the orcs, you know. When they occupied Moria, they drove decent folk away from all the region around. Now they are gone and Gandalf sent the Balrog back to the depths. We send our ores to the Lonely Mountain where we refine them and use the metals to fashion many wonderful things. But it's such a long way by foot or pony."

Sam poured himself a bit more tea and thought a moment as he stirred in seven spoons of sugar. "Yes," Sam said. "It's too bad there isn't a better way to get your ore to the Lonely Mountain and then to get your wares to communities farther away including the villages here in the Shire. I have been thinking along similar lines. We have a hard time getting in goods from across the Misty Mountains, or sending Merry's fireworks out of the Shire."

"I'm glad to hear you are thinking along these lines, Sam. What you need is a mighty horse to carry your timber, an iron horse." Gimli paused a moment to peek inside his beard at the little hobbit girl building a nest there. If you hadn't seen Goldilocks climb onto Gimli's lap, you would have thought that his beard was giggling. "I propose that we join forces. Dwarves, hobbits, and men should work together to build a railroad connecting Dale, Moria, and the Shire."

"An iron horse?" Sam asked. "I've never heard of an iron horse, nor of a railroad. What's that?"

While Middle Earth represents our past, it's a different past than the one recorded in our history books. It seems our world has more than one past, and our time is connected irregularly to most of them. Most of us are unaware of any connection at all. One of the peculiarities with the way our time is connected with the past that was Middle Earth is that the end of the Great War of the Rings overlaps in places with what we know as the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And for some magical reason, some of the places where they overlap the most are those places where old locomotives were stored before they were scrapped. As a result, many old steam engines have slipped from our time into theirs. The dwarves and some of the other people of Middle Earth are tinkers and artisans. They enjoy making things by hand one at a time, and they like to keep anything they make in good and useful order for as long as they can. What they would never enjoy is Mr. Ford's great invention, the assembly line. They like things rather simple and rustic, and a modern factory would interest them not at all. Their manufactories are small shops where a few men makes a complete product from beginning to end. But when our worlds come near each other, the Middle Earthers can whisk away machines we have discarded without our ever realizing it. Once in Middle Earth, the people there use their skills as tinkers to keep the machines going a very long time.

Gimli took a moment to fill his pipe with good Longbottom leaf and get it properly lit. "A railroad, Sam, has wagons that move through the power of steam along rails of iron set on the ground. The steam wagon is called a 'locomotive' or sometimes an 'iron horse'. It pulls other wagons that can carry logs, lumber, ore, or anything else for long distances. The locomotives are wonderful machines, as beautiful as any clock ever built! We can make the rails using our good iron. It's a real adventure without much danger. What do you say?"

There was a lot more talking, some deciding, a good bit of planning, and then an even bigger bit of building. But the job was finally done. The men of Dale built a 3-foot gauge railroad all the way from Lake Town to Bree-land while the Hobbits laid rail to connect the villages of the Shire with Bree. Meanwhile, the dwarves laid rail from Moria to Longbottom in the Shire and to Bree. When it was finished, the new railroad was called the Lake Town & Shire. The men in Lake Town built a lumber mill to process timber hauled in by rail from Mirkwood Forest, but the small lumber mill at Michel Delving in the Shire also continued to operate successfully now that it could receive logs from all over the Shire and Bree-land by train.

The LT&S uses a variety of motive power. Three geared locomotives, a three-cylinder two-truck Shay, a Class B Climax, and a two-truck Heisler, were acquired by magical means to handle the logging mining chores. An 0-4-4T Forney and a Baldwin 4-4-0 pull express passenger trains and mixed trains. A Baldwin 4-6-0 leads up local freights. A Baldwin 2-8-0 is in the LT&S shops for overhaul. When it is ready, it will help the 4-6-0 with freight service.

Only a few years after the Hobbiton Division was completed, the Middle Earth Railroad arrived at Lake Town, connecting the region by rail to Gondor and even to Harad. The people of Middle Earth like the narrower 3' gauge and use it as their standard throughout their railway system. They build their railroads to conform with the land better than we do, and they don't mind if the journey takes longer. They enjoy trains so much that no train trip ever seems long enough.

The Hobbiton Division divides at Hobbiton. The main line extends through the forests of the Green-Hill Country to Longbottom while a short branch extends to Overhill. There are passenger/freight stations at Hobbiton and Longbottom and small passenger stations at Bagshot Row and Overhill. Took Mercantile receives all kinds of freight from all over Middle Earth, then redistributes it throughout the Shire and to logging sites in Green-Hill Country and to the saltpeter mines in Buckland by rail and by wagon. The Gandalf Fireworks Factory uses wood from the Green-Hill Country to make charcoal and saltpeter from Buckland. It imports other chemicals from elsewhere in Middle Earth. The enterprising hobbits of Overhill formed the Overhill Spring Water Company and began shipping water from local springs to the rest of Middle Earth by the tanker-load.

Although for the most part peace now reigns throughout Middle Earth, passengers traveling on the LT&S from Hobbiton to Lake Town still might experience a little excitement as they spot a giant, a goblin, or a troll on the heights of the Misty Mountains or in the depths of Mirkwood Forest.

This page last modified: 10/10/2003.

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