Edna St Vincent Millay - Brief Encounter 1946 - The Taking of Pelham One Two Three 1974 - The Lady Vanishes 1938 - Hitler’s Bodyguard TV - Ronald Reagan - W H Auden & Night Mail 1936 - Fred Dibnah TV - Mark Williams TV - Ronald Top TV - Rory McGrath TV - Dan Cruickshank TV - Mack Gordon - Thomas Hardy - James Thomson - World’s Busiest Train Station: Shinjuku TV - Anna Funder - Sylvia Plath - Denis Johnson - D H Lawrence - Timeshift TV - Dan Snow TV - George Orwell - Nick and Margaret & The Trouble With Our Trains TV - John Betjeman - Richard Wilson & Dispatches TV - Jimmy Savile TV - Rochelle Turner - E B White - Misha Glenny - The World’s Most Famous Train TV - The Venice-Simplon Orient Express TV - The World’s Fastest Train TV - Fully Fitted Freight TV - Mark Thomas Comedy Product TV - George Carlin - Jacques Peretti - The Flying Scotsman: A Rail Romance TV - Joanna Lumley’s India TV - Masterminds TV - Intercity 125: The Train that Saved Britain’s Railways TV - The Commuter 2018 - Unstoppable 2010 - Ian Hislop’s Trains that Changed the World TV - Seconds from Disaster TV - Tonight: True Cost of Train Travel TV - Andrew Marr TV - James Nesbitt TV - How Corporate Greed Destroyed East Palestine TV - Rob Bell TV - The Wednesday Play TV - This World: Why Trains Crash TV -
The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.
All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.
My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take.
No matter where it’s going. Edna St Vincent Millay, Travel
There’s your train. You mustn’t miss it. Brief Encounter 1946 starring Celia Johnson & Trevor Howard & Stanley Holloway & Joyce Carey & Cyril Raymond & Everley Gregg & Marjorie Mars & Margaret Barton & Alfie Bass & Wallace Bosco & Sydney Bromley et al, her to him
Now you take my advice, kid. You serve your six months and then you put in for the movement. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three 1974 starring Robert Shaw & Walter Matthau & Martin Balsam & Hector Elizondo & Earl Hindman & James Broderich & Dick O'Neill & Lee Wallace & Tony Roberts & Doris Roberts & Rudy Bond et al, director Joseph Sargent, guard to guard
Sorry, this station is Fifty-First Street. ibid. rookie guard
I’m taking your train. ibid. Ryder to driver
Pelham One Two Three, come in please. ibid. controller
Nobody else leaves ... You are being held by four very dangerous men armed with machine guns. ibid. Ryder
They’re going to fly the train to Cuba. ibid. Rico
She’s moving. Pelham One Two Three. ibid. lady announcer
There’s nobody driving the fucking train! ibid.
Officer, I suppose you couldn’t use a quarter of a million, could you? ibid. Ryder
We’re going to search this train; there’s something definitely queer in here. The Lady Vanishes 1938 starring Margaret Lockwood & Michael Redgrave & Paul Lukas & Dame May Whitty & Cecil Parker & Basil Radford & Googie Withers & Mary Clare & Naunton Wayne et al, director Alfred Hitchcock, him to her
Another means of transport became available: trains. Official German government coaches. Hitler’s Bodyguard: Hitler’s Dangerous Train Journeys, History 2008
He would travel across the vast expanses of his European conquests ... to the battle-fronts. ibid.
We’re going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours. Ronald Reagan, State of the Union address 1986
This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland border,
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder. W H Auden, Night Mail, 1936
8.30 p.m. Weekdays and Sundays: The Down Postal Special leaves Euston for Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. ibid.
500,000,000 letters every year. ibid.
When the bag is full it is tied, labelled and sealed ready for dispatch by apparatus or at the next stop. ibid.
Steam power brought about a revolution in transport. It was one of Britain’s greatest contributions to the industrial world. In the age of steam the railways moved everything and everybody. Fred Dibnah’s Age of Steam: The Transport Revolution, BBC 2003
The very last steam loco was withdrawn from British Rail service in 1968. ibid.
Locomotive engineering reached its peak between the 1930s and the 1950s. It was the time when the great passenger express locos were built. ibid.
By this time the first steam powered locos designed to run on metal tracks appeared on the scene. And the pioneer as with so many things associated with steam was the great Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick. ibid.
Stephenson wasn’t the inventor of the locomotive, but he played a leading part in turning it into a practical means of hauling coal and transporting passengers over long distances. It was the beginning of the railways as we know them. ibid.
Originally there were nine of these winding-engine houses, and this is the only one left. And it actually still works. ibid.
As the railway network spread across the country it was the locomotive that won the day. ibid.
The development of the railways wasn’t straightforward, especially when the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was involved. While Britain’s network had developed with a four-foot-eight-and-a half-inch gauge, Brunel’s Great Western Railway was built with a completely different seven-foot-and-a-quarter-inch gauge ... They did away with Mr Brunel’s extra line on the outside. A shame really. ibid.
In spite of losing the battle of the gauges, Great Western Railway went from strength to strength. And in 1902 they appointed George Jackson Churchward as their locative superintendent, and he produced a range of designs that were far ahead of their time and very successful. ibid.
Between 1804 and 1971 Britain built an incredible one hundred and ten thousand steam locomotives. ibid.
They’re magnificent on a moonlit night. Fred Dibnah’s Railway Collection: The Great Days of Steam e5, BBC 2008
I always wanted to be an engine driver. ibid.
I wish I’d have lived then. ibid.
And this is probably the most famous locomotive from that time – built at Doncaster – The Flying Scotsman. ibid.
1926 – Mallard left Grantham heading towards Peterborough ... A hundred and twenty six miles per hour. ibid.
The skills of building a mainline locomotive have almost died. But here in Darlington they are keeping the skills alive. ibid.
It makes you wonder if they’d carried on with the development of the steam locomotive what could have happened. ibid.
Mallard was one of the many A-4 class steam locomotives built by [Nigel] Gresley for the London and North East Railway. Fred Dibnah’s Age of Steam: Steam and the Modern Age
The speeds increased and train loads grew heavier. Locomotives grew in size and in the 1920s the Great Western Railway locomotives were amongst the most advanced. By the 1930s famous streamlined locomotives like Mallard were being built. Fred Dibnah’s Railway Collection e6: Railway Preservation
In 1955 the first diesel locomotive – Deltic – was built, and signalled the end of the line for the steam locomotive. ibid.
All these lovely old engines started to rust away in scrapyards. ibid.
The Railway Preservation Movement was born. ibid.
Robert Stephenson and his company of course didn’t just build locomotives, they built the lines and the bridges and all the engineering works. Fred Dibnah’s World of Steam, Steel and Stone: Men of Iron
This locomotive was built in 1957 and was the pinnacle of steam engineering. Mark Williams, On the Rails s1: Cornish Steam Giant, Discovery 2004
Richard Trevithick ... He was a natural talent. A natural engineer. A problem solver. But even so no-one at the time imagined this was the man who would build the first high-pressure steam-engine, the first car, and the world’s first railway locomotive. ibid.