The Tyne and Wear Metro is to replace its ageing 40-year-old rolling stock with steam trains. Transport chiefs say the plan would see disruption from overhead wire faults fall down to almost zero. A Nexus spokesman also added it would make the service 70% more reliable, speed up journey times by 20% and be “100% more steampunk.”
When asked about the drastic increase in pollution this would cause, Metro management said that the smoke-clogged tunnels under the city would act as a deterrent for anyone still not wearing a mask. They also added that a 5-minute journey across the Toon would only be the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes and at “around a third of the cost, it really is a bargain.”
The train operator said this plan would actually decrease their carbon footprint, as they are following the lead of the “tree-hugging hippies” in the energy sector by replacing the trains’ coal-burning furnaces with clean carbon-neutral ones fuelled with wood pellets. This is despite the calls from climate campaigners that biomass burning produces an even greater volume of CO2 than coal, as there is less energy density in wood. According to official estimates by the rail engineers: 40,000 tons of wood is needed to be found to operate the new trains per year “but everything’s fine as the sourcing’s handled by Amazon.”
Once City Council member defended the plan, saying: “We’re going back to nature, man: it’s 100% natural and organic; everyone burnt trees before the Industrial Revolution, including on their steam trains.”
The Council’s transport committee also defended the plan, saying the upgrade to steam would save millions of pounds compared to their previous Metro upgrade, which is still years away. This is due to the fact that scores of museums and historical preservation societies are more than happy to sell locomotives off on the cheap after visitor numbers in the pandemic have dropped to only the “most hardcore of train enthusiasts”. They hope that by sending these locos to the Toon, “all those nerds would follow too, and give us a bit of peace and quiet for once.”
The Toon Lampoon 