This is the cutting made for Stephenson’s railway. At three and a half kilometres long and twelve metres deep it took forty barrel runs to take away the earth. At times 20,000 navvies were employed to build the line to Birmingham. ibid.
When steam-power really got going as a moving force it wasn’t on the roads, it was on the railways. By the 1860s locomotives were criss-crossing Europe, but on the roads self-powered vehicles were in for a bumpy ride especially in England. (Car & Steam & Trains & Railways & Engineering & Industrial Revolution & England) Ronald Top, More Industrial Revelations: Europe s4e6 – Exploding Engines
Trains occupy a special place in our hearts. We grew up wanting to drive Thomas the Tank Engine ... York is a puffing Mecca: it has the largest railway museum in the world ... Mallard set the record back in 1938 when she reached 126 [125.88] miles an hour. Rory McGrath’s Industrial Revelations: Best of British Engineering s5e4: Vehicles, Discovery 2008
The magnificent steam locomotives of the Great Western Railway: a combination of elegance and raw power. They still evoke a spirit of adventure. Great Railway Adventures with Dan Cruickshank: Brilliant Brunel, Channel 5 2010
Brunel was obsessed about every detail, building wonderful stations to suit his great enterprise. Nothing deters him. The Great Western Railway was just part of his steam-driven revolution. ibid.
The construction of the Great Western Railway between Bristol and London was inspired by Brunel’s vision to bring speed and comfort to the experience of travel. ibid.
It was the coming of the railway that led to Britain adopting a standard time across the country. ibid.
Brunel would eventually lose the battle of the gauges. ibid.
When the Great Eastern was launched its paddles were driven by the biggest marine steam-engine of its day. ibid.
After a journey of just fifteen days and five hours his Great Western steamship made a triumphant entry into New York Harbor. ibid.
Brunel had produced two of the finest ocean steamers in the world, but the city of Bristol failed to take advantage of his genius. ibid.
Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-choo,
Track twenty nine,
Boy, you can give me a shine ... Mack Gordon, song 1941
In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy,
And the roof-lamp’s oily flame
Played down on his listless form and face,
Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,
Or whence he came ... Thomas Hardy, Midnight on the Great Western
‘There is not much that I can do,
For I’ve no money that’s quite my own!’
Spoke up the pitying child –
A little boy with a violin
At the station before the train came in, -
‘But I can play my fiddle to you,
And a nice one ’tis, and good in tone!’
The man in the handcuffs smiled;
The constable looked, and he smiled, too,
And the fiddle began to twang;
And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang
With grimful glee:
‘This life so free
Is the thing for me!’
And the constable smiled, and said no word,
As if unconscious of what he heard;
And so they went on till the train came in –
The convict and boy with the violin. Thomas Hardy, ‘At the Railway Station, Upway’
As we rush, as we rush in the train,
The trees and the houses go wheeling back,
But the starry heavens above that plain
Come flying on our track. James Thomson, Sunday at Hampstead 1863-5
The station is as big as sixty football pitches. They have just three hours a night to make it sparkle. World’s Busiest Train Station: Shinjuku, Channel 5 2013
The world’s biggest crowds. ibid.
It’s attention to detail as an extreme sport. ibid.
Every two minutes a train arrives at every platform. ibid.
They have to provide women-only carriages. ibid.
The desperate attempt to stay on time had led to one of Japan’s worst rail disasters. ibid.
Metro lines … carry eight million people every day. ibid.
I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going. Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed. Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence. D H Lawrence
In Darlington in 2008 a team of enthusiasts is building the first brand-new British steam locomotive from scratch in nearly fifty years. It’s a multi-million-pound endeavour that started nearly twenty years ago. Time Shift: The Last Days of Steam BBC 2011
It’s theatrical. It’s dirty. Noisy. Powerful. It’s heavy metal in motion. ibid.
Over two and a half thousand brand-new locomotives between 1948 and 1960. ibid.
But I really am going on a journey – back to a lost era of rail travel when trains had character, style and names. Time Shift: The Trains That Time Forgot: Britain’s Lost Railway Journeys, BBC 2015
Around three hundred and fifty named trains have come and mostly gone in this country. ibid.
From this day in 1830 nothing would be the same again. This is where the modern world begins. Locomotion: Dan Snow’s History of Railways
One billion passengers still travel these lines each year. ibid.
By the early 1800s British was at the centre of a world-wide trading web. ibid.
The people fell in love with them. ibid.
The Stockton & Darlington became world famous. ibid.
The Railways came along and changed everything. ibid.
In the late 1830s a great swathe of Victorian London was ripped apart. The railway had arrived in the capital. Locomotion: Dan Snow’s History of Railways II
Hills were being mined and blasted, valleys were being bridged. ibid.
Trains could already hit fifty miles an hour. ibid.
The working classes got their first taste of the railway … cheap excursions were being offered. ibid.
As the investors vowed never to gamble on the railways again, the whole banking system teetered on the edge. The government had to step in. ibid.
Britain begins to export the railways to the rest of the world. ibid.
In just fifty years railways have rocketed from a few lines carrying coal to the strongest industry in the strongest nation on the planet. Railways had come of age. Locomotion: Dan Snow’s History of Railways III
The railways would unify people as never before. ibid.
Whose railways were they anyway? ibid.
Health & Safety was an alien concept. ibid.
Warren Point, 12th June 1889: 800 tickets were printed but 950 people got on that train, two thirds of whom were children but they never arrived here at Warren Point. ibid.
Workers’ rights had become national and political. ibid.