Please Mind the Gap S1| Episode 0: "The Pilot"
(Finally I updated this story! Though the new chapters still need to be made)
=====||PMtG: “The Pilot” Plot: ||=====
It's 1917, and tensions of “the Great Bloody War” have risen to a concerning degree. And the demand for the mass transportation of goods, supplies, & munitions has rapidly increased, so much so that it was starting to show signs beyond the capabilities of steam locomotives, their main source of rail-motive power at the time.
However, that task was luckily handed over to the English government, and the English government handed that job over to… British Railways, the Royal English Nationally-owned, provincially-operated railway board that oversaw operations of 4 smaller “subdivision” railway boards that would oversee the operation of 120 privately-owned railways in various regions, those being the Northern, Eastern, Southern, and Western Regions of the mainland, that being Great Britain.
There were 2 larger railway boards that oversaw operations in Scotland and Wales and several smaller ones in the Nowhere Islands off the Northwestern coast of the United Kingdom; these islands appear to be “sister islands” to the Island of Mann, with the most closely related island being the Island of Suddery, often abbreviated for short as “The Island of Sodor.”.
Those 4 railway boards on the mainland would become the LMS, LNER, East Line, SER, and the GWR. The other 2 in other regions of the United Kingdom would be the LMS, the Wales and Britain Coast, and the Nowhere Islands would have had their own railway boards; as for the Nowhere Islands, they were individually considered their own region in the British Empire; their railway boards were often connected to the much larger railways as mentioned previously.
As you see, British Rail had a serious problem at hand: the need for military-purpose trains has been growing rapidly to a rate that the railway board cannot foresee operations that can be done quick enough. Several privately owned “subsidrary” companies have tried to cope with this issue, but wartime demand and struggles reduced the amount of engines being built and the parts being made, and factors to this were caused by the increasing cost of labour, and fuel raising by a significant amount.
Since British Rail has passed down said responsibility of transport down to the privately-owned railways
