Steam Locomotives Quotes

I shed many a tear when the steam engines went out of style on the railroads. I'd like to seem them come back, but I realize the diesels are more efficient.

I should say that I usually have a good experience on Amtrak. Still, if Amtrak could replace electric horns with steam whistles, they could make big strides. A horn is a horn is a horn, but a steam whistle is a voice and a song. People used to know which engineer was running which engine based on the call of the whistle.

Many Americans have a romanticized view of trains, rooted in a bygone era of elaborately adorned rail cars lit by flickering gas lamps and pulled by smoke-belching steam locomotives.

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.

'Night Mail' belongs quintessentially to the age of steam. It is impossible to simply go with the idea of remaking it.

I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.

The railroads once were a dominant power in American life, for good and for ill. There's something inevitably nostalgic about a train book today. Trains attract us, but part of that attraction is cultural memory.

Travelling the railways of Europe with a century-old guidebook can be disconcerting: fares, food, and drink seem shockingly expensive compared with what they were; trains and paddle-steamers run to unexpected timetables (assuming they're still running at all); and not only states but whole empires have been wiped from the map.