Five hours of gameplay and they still haven't completed the train. Oh, not because they haven't figured out what to do. Clint and Christian figured that out before we started. But, for some reason I cannot fathom, RNGesus put his foot down.
How? Simple. They rolled an encounter at every turn. This has got to be the first time in the tunnels where they had more than 1 encounter in a day. I think they actually had 3 at one point. And the first one was the worst.
As the game started Globat (As Golbat is heretofore to be called) cast a Wall of Ice on the condenser (which actually allowed it to condense) as a test. After resetting the boiler plate, off they went. They got that thing up to 60 miles an hour for about 17 minutes, after which the spell wore off.
Being the end of the day Globat decided to rest and enchant the condenser in the morning. And while they were asleep they rolled an attack of 14 (count em) Rust Lords! Randomness dictated that said ore fiends were coming from in front of the train. And eating the tracks as they went. Because . . . rust monsters.
Now lets think about that for a second. They've been underground for something like 3 weeks at this point, scavenging all they could to build a train. They finally get their train together and what happens? They come under attack by the only creatures in the area that would see such an object as a tasty treat!
Fortunately the Kobold had installed himself in the train's light fixture, giving his Hellknight granted darkvision a prime view of the scuttling monster's approach. He spotted them 400 feet away, immediately got in the train, and began screaming like he was dying.
Roused, the group braked and spilled out of the train. In a rare act of combat awareness, Zornesk cast light on an arrow and fired it at the approaching calamity. The others immediately stopped their recitation of The Boy Who Cried Wolf and fanned out.
In keeping with his reputation for pure chaos, Quagrim forwent summoning Bob. Instead he summoned a Brachiosaurus! Zornesk immediately alighted on its head and pulled out his composite bow. And while said dinosaur was working its way forward (I decided that something that big would ignore rough terrain) Globat ravaged the group with Chains of Fire. Minerva flew to the enemy and began clawing them to death.
By the time the two groups met, the rust lords were so damaged that the dinosaur killed half of them in one fell sweep, and could have kept going had it chosen its targets in a better order. The rest didn't last much longer. Damned Great Cleave! None of them got even close to the train.
And if the group's rolls had been par for the course that's all they would have encountered. But in the process of enchanting the condenser and moving tracks from behind the train to fill in the gaps from that first fight the group was set upon by two more groups. And the last act of the day was when Zornesk made a sign saying "Missing Tracks" after the gap in the tracks. Quagrim then moved it to the other side of the gap, which was of dubious value considering how fast trains go. Yes, it was a normal sized sign. I'm fairly certain these are the same people that place DIP! signs.