The Iron Trench
Let me dork out a bit about my lore on my OCs in Fallout. Since the latest mainline game is Fallout 4 I have the boys in Boston with Loke and Jelani meeting Trevor and Aleksandr once they settled in Boston.
I have no SoSu, she's just a nameless woman who went through the story, joined the Minutemen, became general, destroyed the Institute and given the bs she had to deal with as soon as the Institute was destroyed she took synth Shaun and left. Where? No one except Preston knows and he had no need or intention to tell anyone where she left to. She needed to heal from everything she went through and lost.
The war against the Institute and the Brotherhood of Steel was devastating. It was a hard fought victory and honestly the Minutemen and Railroad won by the skin of their teeth. There were catastrophic loses of people, settlements, resources, and just about almost everything.
So five months after that war the Commonwealth was chaos incarnate with surviving BoS either joining raiders (oh the irony...), gunners, and very, very few joining the Minutemen. Raider numbers tripled as they saw that the MM were weakened, everything south of Concord, Medford, and Salem was taken over by raiders and gunners took advantage. They charged civilians a buttload of caps to protect them and hardly ever even did a thing. Basically robbing people of their caps.
Trevor, fresh out of Vault 75 (don't worry about it), was gonna leave Boston because it was a mess but his desire to put his talents to use and the excitement of the chaos made him stay. He just walked up to Garvey and said he wanted to join. He did and over the span of a year he rose through the ranks until he made it to the rank of general (most of it thanks to his training and the fact that he survived). He was ecstatic about his new rank.
Trevor has a very militant mindset given where he was born and raised. Yes, he is part of the Vault 75 brood of child soldiers and he was damn good at it. Under his command the Minutemen got a bit of an edge to them that Preston wasn't too keen on but he remained by his side since Trevor wasn't evil and he was getting results. Year after year general Ravencroft managed to reclaim bits and bits of the Commonwealth back from the raider and Gunner threat.
One of Trevor's very dearest pet projects is The Iron Trench. All over the the railroads of the Commonwealth are parts of pre-war trains just sitting around. With the help of Institute survivors dying to find forgiveness from the people of the Commonwealth they managed to put the pieces together to make one very massive, very armored, and very heavily armed train called The Iron Trench (can you tell I've been obsessed with Trench Crusade lately?).
As seen on this map the red line is the train tracks that pass through the Commonwealth. As the Iron Trench was being built a bunch of people were gathered to fix the tracks. The tracks took longer than the building of the actual train thanks to raider and Gunner and super mutant attacks.
This project took about a year and a half. But once the Iron Trench was finished it was a force to be reckoned with. This monstrosity was clad in heavy armor, there is a lone vertibird on top of it to chase down targets, it has 4 sections (carts? I don't know what sections of trains are called and am too lazy to look it up at the moment) each wielding heavy machineguns (use this as a ref).
The train is occupied with very specific Minutemen: Task Force V42. Basically the special forces of the Minutemen. These fuckers do not fucking mess around, they are the equivalent of NCR veteran rangers but jacked up to the inth level. These are beasts in human and ghoul form. Every TFV42 soldier within the Iron Trench is decked out in power armor and armed to the teeth with miniguns and battle rifles basically making them and the train a sort shock and awe response to high level threats.
The Iron Trench goes from Outpost Zimonja (which is a Minutemen outpost not a settlement) all the way down to Outpost Ajnomiz (made up, which, is also not a settlement but an actual outpost). The Iron Trench rests at Oberland Station to make it easier and faster to reach anywhere it needs to get to. Starlight Drivein, Graygarden, and Egret Tours Marina will have some Task Force V42 soldiers living in them to make transportation and distribution all the easier for tackling high level threats.
Now, despite general Ravencroft's efforts the Commonwealth is still rife with heavy resistances from all sorts of enemies and it is still a very dangerous place in certain areas. No matter how much he tried he couldn't recover the Quincy region, safe for Spectacle Island thanks to the water between the mainland and the island (spoiler: there is some creepy ass shit in the water). As of now the Minutemen have no armada though it's an idea that's been thrown about and in the works. Settlements still face many challenges and people still have to fight. Nuka World was a disaster for the Commonwealth (we'll cover NW in another post), a lot of Institute experiments managed to be unleashed, outer Commonwealth raiders came running thinking it was for the taking after the war for the Commonwealth. Super mutants got bold and a hell of a lot meaner. Some survivors from the BoS are still alive and have called themselves Maxson's Legacy (🙄) and attack MM on sight. The Children of Atom are acting extremely bizarre and suspicious though they haven't attacked anyone but they're still under watch.
Because the Institute is no longer a threat the RR kind of, sort of dissolved as their main goal was pretty much achieved and so kind of fell into a sort of fallow state so they blended into the Minutemen though a very select few remained behind to help synths that still face problems with civilians still seeing them as threats. Some just need help with acclimating to a new life outside of servitude so the RR set them up with allies.
It took general Ravencroft 6 years to get the Minutemen army back up and bring it back from its second death and as strong as it is now. Is the Commonwealth in a better state than it was before the war with the Institute and BoS? Yes. Is it a rainbow colored paradise where nothing is dangerous and nothing ever goes wrong? Lmao...hell no. But hey, it proves for being an exciting place to be if you can handle yourself.
There's soooooo much lore I need to post about but I'll get to it.
Oh, and by the way, Jelani arrived in Boston 8 years after the war for the Commonwealth. I don't like using years as time frames because that's a mess and a half for me. So he, Loke, and Uthorim arrived at a fun and spicy moment.
