I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.
The railroad originally was as completely dissociated from steam propulsion as was the ship.
I'm rather proud of having been a trainspotter.
My favourite British line is the West Highland line. It was built across moorland where no one had succeeded in building a road. So everything in that area is there because of the railway line.
Seaboard Air Line, which was thought by numerous innocents to provide a foothold in aviation, was another favorite, although, in fact, it was a railroad.
You don't sign up to 'Trainspotting' expecting glamour.
I'm fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I'm fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies.
I have liked trains since I was a boy, although I was never a train-spotter.
As a young boy, I had the usual hobbies - sports, baseball cards, model airplanes and trains. But I always had a distinct fascination with trains.
It is only comparatively primitive machinery that affords a stimulus, and there is already a faint period touch about Pacific 231 and Le Pas d'Acier. One feels...that Prokofieff should have written ballets about the spinning jenny and the Luddite riots; that Honegger should have been there to celebrate the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the death of Huskisson with a "Symphonie Triomphale et Funèbre".
I think most of the world would like to be Scottish. All the Americans who come here never look for English blood or Welsh, only for Scottish and Irish. It's understandable. The Scots effectively created the face of the modern world: the railways, the bridges, the tunnels.
I do rather rejoice when people come up to talk to me about railways.
