When King Robert-I returned from King's Landing after defeating the Greyjoy Rebellion he was surprised to see a strange ship moored in Blackwater Bay, blown upon their shores by freak accident. She was three times as long as the largest galleass, iron hulled and masted with huge chimneys amidship. Battered but intact. He met with it's captain and the most senior passenger, a man which went by the honorific of monsieur and the name of Victor DuNice. A charming man who spoke with a strange accent and who offered his services to the King for his support. When asked what he could offer the Iron Throne, he told him that his interests and skills lay in matters metallic and mechanical and he had a variety of employees and gear on hand in his fateful voyage that blew him far from his homeland. As a demonstration he had a toy of his set up before the Iron Throne. A small device that could be held in one hand with a small spirit lamp which he put down in a ring of metal and wood a bit more than two yards (or more properly as the people of Westeros would soon learn, two meters) in diameter which it puffed around. That amused the king and the courtiers, but he caught the king's attention when he said he could make one far bigger.





And so with the patronage of the Iron Throne he and his men went to work with thousands of men and women drawn from King's Landing. Outside the Old Gate huge furnaces rose with a ravenous appetite for ore and (on Victor's assistance) pit coal baked into fine coke to produce rivers of iron to feed into huge fire spitting kettles to make steel. Machines from the damaged iron ship were unloaded and stripped to aide the process of construction of further buildings and more machines. Construction went quicker than many had thought possible, but still four years passed as the job continued. Many of the blacksmith guilds complained to the king, but they eventually found the abundance of ingots that flowed from the works to be a significant mollifier. Then, 294 years after Aegon the Conqueror's coronation in Old Town the doors at the DuNice Railworks opened and from it rolled an iron beast belching smoke and chugging along a length of test track. For this monuments occasions King Robert and his queen, son, daughter and court came out to observe this mechanical marvel. As it came by, the Young Crown Prince famously got rather scared and had a brief bout of panic at the strange thing went by while his sister simply marveled at the new Locomotive.





The next four years would see a surge of rail construction. Robert named Victor DuNice the Lord of the Iron Road and gave him an official monopoly on rail travel in exchange for a fifth of all revenue. A line was run to Riverrun to the North, another pushed southwest into the Reach and a third branched off to snake down into the Stormlands to Dorne. Some lords resisted the change, though this changed when King Robert in all the panoply of war marched out with a formidable host behind him to enforce cooperation they typically relented. In any case, many nobles found that trains moving out from Kings Landing with flatbed cars loaded Rails and prefabricated water towers returned to the city empty, which could bring their harvests to that hungry city at a fraction of what it cost to send it by cart. By the time Ned Stark made his way to King's Landing, he made half the journey in an well appointed passenger car. As he sat back enjoying a hot meal as he the wheels rolled smoothly along the rails and watched the scenery roll by, he thought that Dragonfire and a Throne of Iron had made the Seven Kingdoms one, now fire and iron were binding them even closer together.









A Song of Ice and Fire belongs to George RR Martin.

