Had a call today from the Britain Correspondent of The Economist to ask why the British still love steam trains, decades after they vanished. I’ve thought about this a lot for my books and there’s no simple answer. Partly it’s nostalgia, partly it’s a sense of pride in Britain’s invention of the steam locomotive. But here’s a definition from the great engineer LTC Rolt that I quite like:
“Of all man’s mechanical inventions, the steam locomotive remains the most evocative of power and speed; it differs from most recent inventions whose design and functions are of a different rode, intelligible only to the technician; complicated machines which can fascinate the engineer as complicated tours de force, but which lack that quality which appeals to our aesthetic sense and and stirs the imagination of the layman.”
That works for me!
