Bobington may be ninety minutes from the capital. It will just take eight years and 9.8 billion florins to get there.

The National Parliament in Caldwell voted 198 to 143 on Thursday to approve preliminary design funding — 340 million florins — for the Caldwell-Bobington High-Speed Rail Link, a project that Transport Minister Adrienne Leclerc has called “the most significant infrastructure investment in this nation since the completion of the Western Trunk Line in 1891.”

The current rail journey between Caldwell and Bobington takes approximately four hours on the best of days and considerably longer on the worst — a fact that anyone who has been trapped on a stalled locomotive in the Fenwick Tunnels during a February sleet storm will confirm with feeling. The proposed high-speed line would reduce the journey to eighty-seven minutes, using a new dedicated track that bypasses the congested junctions of the existing network.

“This is not merely a transport project,” Leclerc told Parliament. “It is an economic project. Bobington is the nation’s largest port, its second-largest city, and its commercial engine. The fact that it takes four hours to reach from the seat of government is not quaint. It is a failure.”

The Route

The proposed line would run 340 kilometres from a new terminus at Caldwell’s Kingsworth Station, through the Ashford Lowlands, past the market town of Edgeminster, through a 12-kilometre tunnel beneath the Westhaven Hills, and into Bobington via a new terminal at Port Sovereign — the deep-water district east of the Docklands.

The route has already generated opposition. Farmers in the Ashford Lowlands fear the loss of productive land; the town council of Edgeminster, population 28,000, has expressed alarm at the prospect of high-speed trains passing within 400 metres of the town centre; and the Westhaven Conservation Trust has raised concerns about the tunnel’s impact on the region’s cave systems, which harbour a rare species of blind cave beetle that has become, overnight, the most politically consequential insect in the nation.

“I have nothing against beetles,” said Archibald Pennyman, the Member for Edgeminster, during Thursday’s debate. “But I am not prepared to see nine billion florins and eight years of construction held hostage by an animal that cannot see and does not vote.”

The Conservation Trust responded that the beetle, Trechopsis westhavensis, was identified in 1934, has survived for millennia, and “is entitled to rather more consideration than the Honourable Member appears willing to extend.”

Bobington’s Stake

For Bobington, the project promises both opportunity and disruption. The proposed Port Sovereign terminus would require the demolition of several derelict warehouse blocks — a prospect that, given the current state of the Docklands property investigation, may meet less resistance than it would have a month ago — and the construction of a new interchange connecting to the existing municipal tram and rail networks.

Mayor Blackthorne, who has lobbied quietly for the project for two years, issued a careful statement welcoming the vote while noting that “the detail of routing, land acquisition, and local impact must be resolved through genuine consultation, not parliamentary decree.”

The Docklands Workers’ Association, through foreman Patrick Seldon, expressed cautious optimism: “More construction means more work. But we’ve seen what happens when big projects move fast and workers are an afterthought. We’ll be watching the contracts.”

Preliminary design work will begin this summer. The full construction budget of 9.8 billion florins will require a separate parliamentary vote, expected in early 2027. If approved and built on schedule — two assumptions that the nation’s engineering history suggests are optimistic — the first trains would run in 2034.

In the meantime, the four-hour journey endures. So does the beetle.