Return of Rails
A wonderful read on rails in City of Sound. If you feel a certain yearning in your heart every time you hear a train whistle off in the distance, or the clacking of the wheels hitting the rails as a train rushes through a station, you are going to want to read this worthwhile story that includes videos, photographs, train routes, etc. From the high-speed rail networks of Europe forming a continental grid of high-speed trains
, to Japan’s supreme bullet trains of the Shinkansen, or talk of reinvigorating the USA’s Amtrak as a serious possibility
(And what is the design of new Macbook Air,
Apart from the efficiency, there is no other mode of travel that inspires the imagination as richly as that of rail. There’s a romance to the train journey that has never been fully captured by the aeroplane, save those early heady days of flight, and the initial commercialisation of airways (see Evelyn Waugh’s Labels for an example). The road movie has a certain panache, admittedly, but is usually defined by an existential solitude. Flying is usually defined by anxiety and fear, whereas the train by intrigue, chance, possibility, cameraderie, romance, and travelling rather than arriving. Examples abound, from Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train to Georges Simenon’s The Man Who Watched The Trains Go By to Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, and many others. See also the films, such as Strangers …, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes from Hitchcock alone. You will have your own favourites.
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