Once more I’m calling things anime that are really not, simply because I gotta justify the use of this URL somehow.
Arcane, the League of Legends animated series, is a masterpiece of animation and storytelling, on a level similar to the Spiderverse. Every frame is amazing, its characters are alive and wonderful, its music is inspired, it’s great and you should absolutely watch it.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t flawless. Arcane has two major issues: Caitlyn’s hat, and it doesn’t have enough trains. Thankfully, Caitlyn’s hat gets discarded almost immediately, and even more importantly, there are some trains in it after all. Just not a lot. The first one we see is…
This appears in episode five, after Caitlyn broke Vi out of prison, and it seems to connect the upper levels of the city with the lower levels, in style.
[Image: Screenshot; a cliffside with a fence. At the end is a steep steel bridge carrying a funicular car, leading up to an end station. On top of the station is steel frame tower. Next to it is what looks like a station building. More details are discussed in the text below.]
Damn, this is pretty. Look at all the steel girders. Look at the rivets! Look at the arches and details that are here not only for structural support, but also to make it look nicer, reminiscent of e.g. the more odd details of the Eiffel Tower. I also love the light green color, which is a shade you see a lot on similar old steel constructions. This is just perfect 1890s steel design. And building such a funicular railway on top of a steel bridge is also a well-established and very awesome form of designing them.
We see more of it in the next shot, along with a thankfully hat-less Caitlyn holding tickets for it.
[Image: Screenshot, Caitlyn holding tickets; in the background we see a steel tower with glass viewing area on top]
The tower on top of the appears to be there mainly for tourists who want to get a good view. The design has similarities to a mining headframe, which makes sense; those work differently, but it makes sense to reuse the construction. Note that the tower is on top of the platform, and next to it is a station building where the tickets are probably sold. Everything about this design is well-thought out and realistic, even though I couldn’t name any funicular railway in the real world that is the exact only inspiration. Whoever designed this clearly had fun, but also, they really knew what they were doing. And note that in the grand scheme of things, these are hardly the most impressive frames and details in the show.
It is unclear in that scene whether Caitlyn intends to use the funicular railway or not; she has two tickets and is standing next to the station, but she talks about getting an overview from the “bathysphere”. This thing here is, of course, not a bathysphere, it’s not even spherical. Maybe the funicular leads down to a bathysphere? Maybe it’s the “Bathysphere railway company” because the builder wanted to first build a bathysphere, but then didn’t have the money? (Compare the real-life “Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester and Dubuque Electric Traction Company”, which, despite its name, was never electric)
The funicular car itself is interesting. At the end is has a large semicircular viewing area, which isn’t something I know of in real life, but it’s a detail that makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t have too many other windows, which is unusual for funicular railways that often want to provide a good view, but not too much so.
One thing that’s interesting is that it lets out a puff of smoke as it stops, which implies that this funicular car has air brakes, instead of being braked by the cable that it pulls it up. I don’t know any real-life funicular that does it that way, and I guess I could mark this up as an error. But maybe the funicular safety regulations in Piltover are just different.
A few seconds later we get another look. Our heroes have decided to parkour instead of using the railway, and so we get this shot:
[Image: Another screenshot: In the foreground, a character is running over a pipe that is angled down, in darkness. In the rear, the funicular is running down at a similar angle, much brighter, but getting darker as it descends.]
This really tells us so much about how the city works, both actually and thematically. It is part of a longer great sequence where we follow Vi and Caitlyn from the top side to the bottom, and see how the transition between them really works, while also establishing the characters. Everything about it is beautiful, but even just this one shot already tells us so much. Including about the how the funicular works.
The funicular has a very sleek steel structure, painted in lovely light green, as it descends. Realistically, the structure is way too sleek; for the span between supports we see there, I would expect far more reinforcements and trusses, based on how the tower on top is constructed. Compare e.g. the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn for how much steel trusses something like this normally needs:
[Image: Photo of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn suspended monorail system, on the section that travels along a road.]
But the real point isn’t that, it’s the contrast with Vi running on the pipe in the foreground, in darkness.
You get the clear impression that the funicular, beautiful and in light, is how rich people make the journey down on the few times they have to. In the foreground, we see the alternate way to make the trick; similar, but dark and dangerous. Vi isn’t meant to take this way; as far as the city planners were concerned, someone like her isn’t meant to travel between the top and bottom side at all. She’s not going to let that stop her, of course.
That’s all we see of the funicular. It’s just a tiny bit of just one episode, but it’s generally really well designed, and it tells us something about the time period and the city, while only ever being a background element. Very nice.
The other train appears in episode 8.
This train appears briefly during a scene where law enforcement storms an underground drug den in what appears to be an abandoned factory of some sort. The train in question here is leaving the factory slowly, but then the Enforcers (police officers) take control of it and run it back through the factory gate to get in from an angle that people don’t expect.
[Image: Screenshot of a sort of fantasy steam locomotive pulling out of a gate.]
The train in question here seems to be just a single locomotive, consisting of a lot of boiler and a platform at the back, where barrels of illegal pink drugs are stored. Another angle gives more detail of the platform
[Image: Screenshot of the same train, now a close-up of the platform, full of barrels.]
When it returns to the factory, just on the same track backwards, it goes to a very short unloading track.
[Image: A short section of track ending at a buffer stop, leading to a currently closed door]
So what is up with that? There are a number of unusual things about this. For example, the chimney is at the end of what appears to be the boiler that is closer to the platform than the end of the train. As a general rule in steam locomotive design, the chimney is always at the opposite end from where you put the coals in, so you get a good draft through the tubes in the boiler. But okay, we don’t know where the fire is in this locomotive, or whether it even has one at all.
The really weird thing is the platform. It is fairly large compared to a normal engine, but fairly small compared to the overall thing. A locomotive of that size (I’d say at least ten meters if not more) would generally haul a number of carriages, instead of having a platform in itself. A self-propelled steam freight car would make some sort of sense, but that would get a smaller boiler than this.
Obviously, it’s all fantasy tech, but building a thing that is 80% engine and 20% place to haul stuff is always inefficient no matter what you do.
My head canon theory here is that this is some sort of maintenance of way vehicle that the drug smugglers have repurposed. By design, you can use it to haul either an entire long train (it has couplers and buffers for that), or you can run it on its own and still bring some construction supplies, tools and such. It’s probably not the most efficient for either, but flexible. And that would make it useful for smuggling as well.
The track in the factory is fairly short, but that’s not that unusual. When the factory was active, it probably had to unload one or two cars at a time, and the track is sized properly for that. It would make sense to have some sort of unloading ramp here, but you can’t have everything. I’m okay with that sort of explanation, especially since they leave the rest of the rail network completely vague. It’s not even clear how much of the rest of the rail network still exists.
An aside that I just feel like pointing out because I’m mean: Look at this door here, slightly brightened up:
[Image: Screenshot, a double door on what looks like a wooden shed. The doors have horizontal elements, and each has a vertical metal bar along the entire length.]
These are container doors. This is the type of door you find on a standard ISO shipping container. Considering the level of technology and logistics we see in the rest of the show, I would argue that this makes no sense. Of course, it’s generally too dark to see, so it’s not an actual problem. But if you wanted to see actual problems, you wouldn’t read a post reviewing the trains in this show, would you?
When the train runs back in with all the cops on board, we see a bit more detail of the buffer stop and the front of the train, but generally with too much motion blur (it’s a very action-heavy sequence) to make out details, let alone take pictures of them. This is the best I could do:
[Image: Screenshot, the end of a rail vehicle at an old-time iron buffer stop.]
I think that looks generally alright. You can’t see the coupling here, but you can see it in a different shot that is too full of motion blur to take screenshots of; it looks good, too. The whole thing is a well-made representation of european railroad couplers. (If they had done a good representation of american railroad couplers, that would have been good as well, of course. Here they picked european and stuck with it, and I think the result is good).
The air hoses for the Westinghouse-style air brake also look good. Note that you technically need only one hose here, connected to the hose of the next car if you attach one, but in Europe, most rail vehicles still have two anyway. (This is unrelated to the newer and rarer main air reservoir pipe, which this vehicle doesn’t appear to have and wouldn’t need either.)
All in all, if we assume this is some sort of weird dual-use maintenance vehicle that these smugglers repurposed, then I think everything else can be explained and works well.
There aren’t a lot of trains in Arcane, and the ones that are there aren’t important, but they are really well designed and make sense in context. They are unique novel designs for the show, but their design is realistic and makes sense. This is a good show.
