A Rider's Guide to the B-Lines: DBL Vol. II

We are standing here in Grand Sacral Station, a central hub where several of Soma City’s commuter rail lines converge. With this as our starting point, we can travel in practically any direction we choose.

The Grand Sacral is home to many routes going every which way. Traveling north, we can take the C-Line into the depths of the city’s underbelly, or we could choose any of the several trains that follow the B-Line. Of course, if you aren’t in a hurry or you just happen to be going nowhere fast, you can catch the S-train north or south, or northeast or southwest. For a scenic Sunday ride, this is the train I’d recommend.

As much as I would love that to be my journey today, I promised my editor I’d investigate and tour the many rumored unofficial trains that claim the name “B-Line.” To do this properly, I need to explain a few things about the lore around this train. Officially, there is only one B-Line. That is, according to Soma City Transit Authority™ (SCTA), there is only one track, one route referred to as the B-Line, and that is the Officinalis. Hence the name. It takes us from Plantar Station, up the gastric bypass, to Grand Sacral. From there, it travels through the erector district, over the Occipital Ridge, and terminates at Cranial Station, specifically at the Frontal Archways. Officially, all the B-Trains take that track. Period.

Well… after talking to locals, OG train-goers, the Oldtimers; after hitting up the subreddits and forums, the Onliners – I have gathered no shortage of opinions on the “proper” B-Line to take for this or for that.

I have many a path to choose from – all referred to as “the B-Line,” all unique, all with their own personality and flair. Each seems to attract its own crowd, and each has a purpose the locals swear by.

The thing is, I don’t think anyone sets out to design alternative railways. Someone notices a path, follows it for a while, and discovers that it reliably gets them where they need to go. They may not even realize it isn’t an official line. They just find a way to get from one place to another. Maybe they show a friend. Maybe they give someone directions. Before long, people are riding the route every day, and somebody eventually draws it on a map. Whether that's how these various B-Lines came to be, I can't say for certain. But standing here with a notebook full of conflicting transit maps, it certainly feels plausible.

“It depends on where you're trying to go and when, or maybe how, you want to get there,” said Colin Lumbar, a local plumber. “The fares are too high on the mainline, and it's way too overcrowded.” While ordering some Halal chicken from a food cart, I ran into a woman, Fascia Grace, a perpetual student of the railway. I showed Ms. Grace my chicken-scratch notes, routes drawn over an official transit map, and the various names locals had used for uncharted routes. She confirmed most of them, corrected a few important details, but then told me, with a look of absolute scholarly certainty, “In my opinion, there’s only one B-Line –that’s the Profundus.” I found that a bit odd. We had barely begun our investigation, and already someone was insisting that the one-true B-Line wasn't Officinalis at all. She waved her hand dismissively at the transit map, “It's quiet down there, and you see the same faces day after day. You almost forget how big the city really is.” Grace also shared that she enjoyed the “steampunk aesthetic” of The Profundus. “Almost the entirety of the city works are down there. There’s cables, pipes, tubing, posts, and beams.” She took a sip of her coffee, “It’s a whole world down there, that’s the one you should ride!”

With the corrections Grace made to my map, I started to see the patterns. These routes aren't entirely separate railways. They share bits of track here and there before branching off in their own directions.

We hop on Platform L5 to board, hoping to catch the Profundus. We end up on Officinalis by mistake. We should have noticed it was a few minutes earlier than expected and jam-packed with commuters.

We travel north through the Erector District, on through to the Cervical, and there’s a great view as we cross over the Occipital Ridge and on to Galea’s Pass. As the train comes to a stop, we see the brilliant Frontal Arches of Cranial Station. We step onto the platform and enter Cranial Station. It's beautiful, decorated like an ornate temple. Truly spectacular.

Let’s head down to the lower mezzanine, where we’ll find the Falx Cerebri food court. This is home to some of the most underrated street foods in the city. More importantly for our story, it hides the secret entrance to the ‘worker’s B-Line.’ On the south side of the food court, you will see a large stone archway. It’s not labeled, but if you look around, those who look like they know where they're going all head that way…

This is where you can catch the Profundus, the most subterranean of the B-Lines. And once again, it’s pretty much a straight shot from station to station.

Just outside the archway, which locals call “the big hole,” we wait on the Atlas Platform. Sure enough, the Profundus arrives within moments. It takes us through some sort of tunnel system and plops us right back at Grand Sacral. The whole trip lasted the blink of an eye, like a still point in time.

As I exit the train, I think I figured out what happened with that first train we caught. The Profundus drops off and picks up from S1, right next door to L5. I make a few notes… In addition to my transit map, I have with me an old blueprint of the underground infrastructure of the B-Line… here we can clearly see the tunnel we just went through – labeled “Spinal Canal”- and a whole series of suspensions and guy wires holding these large structures together. With the blueprint, we also have a schematic of the electrical lines and plumbing that feed this part of the city, and it is truly complex.

Now we have to make a decision here...

By now, I am beginning to suspect that not all routes are created equal. Depending on who you ask, which platform you stand on, the time of day, and a handful of other factors nobody can quite explain, you seem to end up on entirely different trains.

The transit authority promises that all the platforms labeled B-Line take the same route... but is it true?

Our developing intel says something different. So, let's test our theory. We are going to wait at platform G-MAX and see if we can't catch the B-Line…

Why this shouldn’t work

Officially, you shouldn't be able to hop glute max to get to the Superficial Back Line. Because the sacrotuberous ligament is of the same continuity as the hamstring... In four-legged land dwellers, the hamstring tendon doesn't glue down to the ischium bone - it connects to the sacrum. What we call the sacrotuberous ligament is this structure. When is a ligament really a tendon? I suppose the gods, or in this case, the train conductor, decided it had a dual purpose.

So, while everyone boards the B-Line, we wait for the next train. It’s not too long after the Officinalis takes off that there she is—the B-Line again. There’s a sign, under the main one, that looks stenciled on. That reads, "ALT." That’s odd, I hadn’t noticed this when trying to catch the Profundus. I board with a group of obvious locals. She takes us right down the lateral ham-line, into the lateral edge of the Gastric Bypass, and continues on to Plantar Station. It worked! We proved the old New England adage, "you can't get there from here," doesn't apply to the B-Line.

Now, we came in on the outside track of Plantar Station... which was a bit odd, because the Officinalis runs on the middle track. So, what would happen if we took the far track, over there? We'll have to take the escalator up to the mezzanine, and while we're there, we'll have to stop at " Popliteal Coffee" and grab ourselves an iced half-caff tensor fascia latte’ for good measure. My readers know by now – that’s my favorite drink.

The famous archways of Plantar Station are stunning. They've been here for hundreds of years. I met an old-timer at the coffee stand; he swears by the line he calls, the Mid-Line. He was wearing an old three-piece tweed suit, a blue fedora, and had a cigar in his mouth. He was clearly from a time long before indoor smoking bans. Maybe he didn't get the memo? Maybe his memory is spotty? "When you get to be my age, son," he chimes, I must have been staring, "you don't give a rat's ass about what others think. I don’t mean to say that you don't care... You just don’t mind… there’s a difference, you see. If it’s truly bothering someone, that's a different story. But conformity for conformity's sake... I don't mind the snide looks... I chuckle at the bemusement... and I genuinely enjoy the looks of concern. I'm 76 years old... what in god's name is this cigar going to do to me? Not a damn thing, Nothing that the chemicals in the water and the artificial clouds aren’t doing already! That’s for damn sure."

This guy’s quite a talker. Somewhere between a tangent about steam engines, diesels, and electrics; and a spirited defense of natural cigars versus the newfangled ones “laced with chemicals,” he managed to tell me how to find his “Mid-Line,” which, if I was keeping my notes straight—and quite frankly, I might not have been at this point—appeared to be the same route others were calling “the Supe.”

Latte' in hand, we take the stairs down to the innermost platform... It's old... a well-worn path, in much need of a firmware update... the lights flicker on and off, pipes and wires dangling from the walls... the paint is peeling, and the ceiling is cracked... and it appears to be a narrow gauge line… but I am confident that we can catch this B-Line.

As I stand there and the caffeine starts to kick in, I get antsy... if this train doesn't come, my whole premise is wrong, and I won't have an article to justify my expense report for Soma City.

But how could all of these locals be wrong? Smokey, even? This guy seemed like he had been around since this railroad was built; his father and grandfather probably both dug these tunnels. Smokey doesn’t say anything, he just points… And sure enough, our train arrives right on time.

“B-Line North,” is all she says.

“Well, come on, I’m not getting any younger,” he says.

We board and, with a jolt, we’re off, heading pretty much up the pathway we just came from, only this time on the inside track. Smokey spends the first part of the ride rambling about railway conspiracies, local politics, and various other grievances accumulated over what I can only assume has been a very long life.

To get him back on track, I ask why he bothered with the Mid-Line at all. He looks at me like I’ve asked why anyone would bother owning more than one wrench.

“Precision, son,” he says. “Most folks look at the back side of this city and see one big railway. That's fine if all you're trying to do is get from one end to the other. But if you're trying to understand how the place actually works, the details matter. Sometimes you need to know which tunnel you're standing in.”

Then, without warning, he stands up, grabs the rail, and announces, “That’s my stop. Good luck, kid.”

 And he pops off at the Popliteal Station. The train continues onto inside ham-track, and oop... what is this? We weave under the glute bridge and onto the sacrotuberous track.

I continue back to Grand Sacral – we offload at the B-Line official platform and get out my map... I add “The Supe” to my notes... It's official! Well… unofficial, but it does exist!

Now it's time to check out an even more mysterious line, “The Occultis.” This line is legendary. Tales of this train have reached almost mythical proportions. No one is quite sure how The OC gets from point A to point B.

In theory, The OC should take the same tracks as all the other B-Lines… but there’s a bit of gray area on that.

One rumor I heard more than once was that The Occultis wasn't originally built for passengers at all. According to some, it began life as a maintenance route, used by railway workers moving between various parts of the system. Others dismissed that idea entirely. Whatever the truth may be, there is something peculiar about The OC. It feels less like a commuter line and more like a series of service corridors that somehow found themselves carrying passengers. Perhaps that's why descriptions of the route tend to be so vague. Everyone remembers where they got on and where they got off. The middle tends to dissolve into hearsay.

The Occultis spends a lot of time in the seams of the city, traveling through the places where one route gives way to another. At least, that's the impression I got from the stories. Ask three riders how it gets from point A to point B, and you'll get four different answers.

It’s true you can catch it at the three main hubs of Soma City™.

Frequent flyers report there’s a lot of liminal space along the way. There’s a sense of getting from one place to another, but not remembering the journey. Like when you drive the same highway day in and day out, and the middle part becomes a blur.

I hopped on The Occultis as my last trip of the day, and I tried to stay alert. And yeah… it got a bit weird. I don’t know if it was the hypnotic rhythm of train wheels on tracks, the mesmerizing flickering of lights both inside and out, or the fact that I'd been hopping trains all day…  but at risk of sounding even more woo than I normally do, this train was strange.

 You get into a sort of trance on The OC. Sure, along the journey, you see all the same sites you see on the other B-Lines, but slightly askew, from a different point of view, and the pathway feels a little bit hazy. At times, it seems we aren't even on a track at all, but somehow traveling in a space in between, where the tracks themselves seem to disappear. At some point, I overheard someone compare it to riding the Wonkavator. You know, that great glass elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? It didn't operate on tracks and could go in any direction it wanted. What if this train operates on a similar principle?

We know it starts with the rest of them, at Plantar Station; and we know people report seeing glimpses of the Achilles, the gastroc and hamstring tracks - but they report seeing those tracks from below, as if you are looking up, like one of those tunnels through an aquarium, while others describe seeing lines above and below them, as if they are dangling in between, in the air, as if they were on The Sky Train, but somehow underground and sandwiched between the Officinalis and the DF-Line.

At the end of the day, my notebook was a mess. Half the routes contradicted one another, half the locals contradicted one another, and somehow they all seemed to be right.