Thórdur shook Halldór’s hand and offered him a seat.
“I am here about Jacob Kieler Junior’s death,” Halldór announced plainly.
“Yes, these are dreadful events,” replied Thórdur. “I still haven’t recovered from hearing about Jacob Junior’s death. He was a fine man.”
“Do you recall the death of Jacob Senior?” Halldór asked.
“Yes, of course. I understand from the news that Jacob Junior suffered a similar fate.”
“Were you working for Jacob Senior when he died?”
“Yes, but we were actually on summer holiday at that time. Otherwise it would probably have been me who found him.”
“Have you seen this picture before?” Halldór asked, passing Thórdur the picture of the railway train.
Thórdur took the picture and examined it carefully.
“Yes, I’ve seen it once before.”
“When was that?”
“Jacob Senior received it in the post a few weeks before the war broke out in Europe. Nobody was supposed to know about the trains here in Iceland at that time, but Jacob was so overjoyed about it that he couldn’t resist showing me his treasure. He knew, of course, that I wouldn’t break his trust. I never saw the picture again, and I have never discussed this with a soul apart from Jacob, until this moment.”
“Whose train is this?”
“This is Jacob’s train, of course. After tireless effort, Jacob had found backers in Germany to provide a substantial part of the finance for the railroad, and an operating company, Isländische Bahn AG, was set up there to produce the rolling stock and lease it to the Iceland Railroad Company. This was the first of two trains that the company made. It was a sensitive subject because of the political situation in Europe, and the identity of the company behind the rolling stock had to be kept secret in Iceland.”
“But the tracks, they didn’t even exist here.”
“That’s right. The Iceland Railroad Company was supposed to look after that side of things, and the steel for the first stretch of track was ready on the quay in Hamburg. The cross ties were coming from Norway. That summer they were going to build the first few kilometers from the harbor, and ship the train to Iceland. Jacob was hoping some local funding for the enterprise would come forth once people saw that it was about to become reality. The war ruined all those plans, of course.”
“What happened to the trains when the war started? Were they used for war operations?”
“No, hardly. You see, Jacob had made the bold decision to use a gauge of just one meter for the track here in Iceland, rather narrower than the standard gauge most commonly found in Europe. As the Icelandic railroad would never be directly linked to another system, he took the view that it didn’t matter if we used a narrow gauge, and it created considerable savings on infrastructure cost.”
“So our trains would have been too narrow for German tracks?”
“Yes. We had some vague news that they had remained dockside in Hamburg, but had eventually been destroyed in the Allied bombardment.”
“They’d have been handsome, those locomotives.”
“Yes, and technologically advanced, able to use either electricity or diesel.”
Thórdur reached for a pipe on his desk and began to stuff it with tobacco.
Halldór decided to change the subject. “You were Jacob’s colleague for some time, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I graduated from the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen in 1935, and began to work for Jacob immediately. We had worked together for ten years when he passed away,” Thórdur replied.
“What did you work on?”
“Mainly incidental engineering jobs: surveying, project supervision, and design. There was actually not much of that sort of thing going on during those years, but when work was scarce, Jacob used the time for research and preparation for the railroad.”
“Were there others working with you?”
“Yes, there was a man called Kristján Jónsson who assisted us with surveying and technical drawing.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Yes. He is a resident of the Grund Nursing Home.”
“Can you describe Jacob to me?” Halldór asked, after jotting down the name of the nursing home.
“He was a short man, less than one meter seventy tall, but well proportioned and so seemed taller. He had a knack for carrying himself in such a way that people did not look down upon him. He was a likable man, extremely intelligent, and a skilled engineer.”
Thórdur lit his pipe and puffed on it enthusiastically before continuing. “Dear Jacob would have appreciated the present times, when there are so many big projects going on and new technology to help us realize them,” he remarked more cheerfully. “Now you can stick a bunch of punched cards into a machine and it calculates equations and curves that previously took us days to work out using slide rules and books of tables. These are great times for the engineering profession.”