I'm an old fart. I grew up on a large farm in East Tennessee, in the foothills
of the Smoky Mountains. The eastern boundary of our farm abutted the main
north-south line of the L&N Railroad. There was a sidetrack there, too, so the
slow freight trains could move off to the side and let the faster passenger
trains go by. The tracks were less than a quarter mile from our house, so we
could see anytime a train was stopped there waiting on another to pass.
These were the days (late '40s, early '50s) before a lawsuit was filed over
every skinned knee or spilled cup of coffee and folks were scared of one
another, and so when my cousin and I would race over to the tracks where a
freight train was waiting and ask permission to climb up into the cab of the
locomotive, I don't recall that we were ever refused.
There is no machine on the face of the earth that seems as much like a living,
breathing thing as a steam locomotive. They grunt and sigh and hiss and are, at
least to my mind, one of the most wondrous machines ever made. To this day, I
remember every detail of these magical behemoths. I still take special trips
just to ride on a train pulled by a steam locomotive.
And then about the time I was 10 or 11, there came the stinky diesels. We,
being excitable children, were initially thrilled at seeing these modern
"streamliners" as they raced down the tracks. But they didn't have any magic;
they weren't alive. They were just big, smelly trucks with steel wheels that
ran the magic off the rails and killed the soul of the railroad. Too bad.
Really too bad.
Walt
--
"Progress might have been all right once,
but it's gone on too long." -- Ogden Nash
-------------- Original message from Chris Barker : --------------
>
> No ;-)
>
> It tended to sweep down the roof and the upper part of the windows. It
> did not really waft into the carriages.
>
> Chris
>
> On 18 Aug 2004, at 8:37, Siddiq wrote:
>
> >
> > On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 08:29:47 +0100, Chris Barker
> >
> > wrote:
> >
> >
> >> I used to travel to school (boarding school) in a steam train, from
> >> Paddington (London) to Bath (Somerset); I used to watch with delight
> >> as
> >> we entered tunnels and all the smoke and steam billowed back down the
> >> train!
> >
> > As charming as that sounds to me, I have to wonder: didn't you choke on
> > all the soot and smoke?
> >
> <|_:-)_|>
>
> C M I Barker
> Cambridgeshire, Great Britain.
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