>>6243204I have brought up that we have a working train and the trackage between Sloan and Boulder City more than once before, but people still seem to be treating the whole network as needing to be done from scratch. We haven't checked it out yet, hopefully the locomotive was nuclear and not diesel (I would think nuclear, since it would presumably have been running up until the War instead of being an ancient thing dragged out of storage like the diesel dragline).
We can very much do syngas or synthetic liquid fuel from wood or coal and that's the route I'd like to go down in the future. We have asked the Boomers about acquiring the corn then use to make their fuel before and were rebuffed, so I'm not sure we'd be able to get much fuel off them either and won't have a surplus of food for some time yet. If the dragline is diesel-electric instead of diesel-mechanical or diesel-hydraulic, we can bootleg something together and wire it up the the power grid.
Manufacturing explosives ourselves will be annoying. Most of them don't really need any special ingredients, it's just a multistep process involving a lot of chemistry. Knowing our luck, some prize specimen will probably take out a cigarette and skip to Stage 6 of the the MRP.
>>6243205That's actually not a bad idea. If we can't use the locomotives for whatever reason, it would be fairly trivial to modify the dump truck to run on rails, where we could use it to tow small consists around like a railcar mover as well as carrying its own cargo. Might even be easier than using the road, which is still full of holes right now.
