Express Train: Volume 3 - From the Ashes

[Underground]

This edition of Express Train will be a special editor's note edition. We deeply apologize that the title is not a train pun.

As you all know this latest edition of Express Train is long overdue. Volume 2, releasing in May 2032 was our last publication and since then much has happened. As you may recall the May edition ended on a flustered but overall positive note and expectations for the Underground baseball team were still very high. Unfortunately things never quite got better in London before finally getting much, much worse. The staff of Express Train were nonetheless working on our next edition titled Derailment and had written a number of high quality pieces about the woeful state of things. I was proud of that edition, a proud of that as I was disappointed in the Underground. We were all set to go to print when I got a call from the boss - Underground General Manager Cyan Winters. I cannot recall a more profane 20 minutes in my entire life.

Everyone involved in the creation of Derailment except myself was fired. Immediately. I would later learn that this was not because they wrote articles critical of the team, or of the decisions being made, or for the particular gallows' humor that permeated that edition. Rather they were fired to save money - the team was desperate to pinch pennies and while trading star players like Jose Aguilera caught the headlines firing entire offices of people certainly helped at the margins as well. As an added insult to injury the release of Derailment was cancelled. Ostensibly this, too, was a savings measure but we later learned that in fact Winters had personally demanded the cancellation in one of his (increasingly frequent) fits of rage regarding the ball club.

Since then it has just been myself and a skeleton crew, mostly the social media team and a few interns that survived the cull on account of being unpaid. It was everything our now tiny shop could do just to keep game programs going out the door and multimedia on the screens during games. Any hopes for a full blown periodical were dashed. Uncertainty abounds for Express Train and all of us, but we are hoping to expand our unpaid intern group and potentially get on our feet this coming offseason. Now at peace with the team's failure, Winters is in a much better place and has signaled tepid support for further editions of Express Train and even hinted at the possibility of an exclusive interview following the conclusion of the season.

So dear readers, here's to a renewed Express Train Season 2, steaming off the presses sooner than later! All aboard!