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On a summer's day 50 years ago, in a small cotton-spinning town in the north of England, a teenage boy takes his much younger brother to a bridge across a railway. There are other boys there, sitting on the fence, waiting. Some have notebooks. Multiple tracks, two for slow trains, two for fast, stretch south to Manchester. At their side, half a mile or so away, lie factories with chimneys trailing wisps of smoke. This is a very smoky place, and on the bridge it is about to become much smokier.
In the quietness, a signal suddenly clatters down to its sloping "line clear ahead" position. "The Manny peg's down," says one of the boys. "Manny" means Manchester, "peg" means signal. A train is coming down the fast track from the north—an express. First there is the distant sound of the locomotive's steam exhaust—a regular bark—then the sight of smoke shooting up into the air. Within a minute or two, the train is in the cutting below the bridge. The boys are covered in a black-and-white cloud of smoke and steam, the bridge trembles, the train roars on.
"A namer!" the boys exclaim. Not all locomotives carry names, but this one does, molded in a curve of brass over the central driving wheel. Engines with names are especially prized. The names, at this place, in those days, could be of military heroes ("Private W. Wood VC"), or of British regiments ("The Royal Scots Greys"), or of British colonies ("Trinidad and Tobago") or of India's princely states ("Kolhapur"). The last world war has ended only a few years before. The British Empire is still with us.
What was the name that day? As the much younger brother of the teenage railway enthusiast on the bridge, I can't remember. All I can remember are maroon carriages hauled by a green engine, the signal going down, the cry of "Manny peg!" and Manchester-bound faces smudged behind the glass. But in the books the other boys held, the name, if new to them, would have been crossed off or noted down.
What I didn't know then was that my brother had introduced me to an infection, which has come and gone throughout my life like a mild but incurable disease: the love of trains. Many people have caught it, and they are mainly men, the men who watch the trains go by. You can find them everywhere—in North America, and Africa, in Germany and in Japan. But as a phenomenon it started in England, and perhaps especially northern England, which is where the disease (addiction may be closer to the mark) is still to be found at its strongest.
No coincidence. The railway as we know it—steel rails, locomotives, signals—was born in this part of the world two centuries ago, first as a more efficient way than horsepower of carrying coal from the pitheads to waiting ships on the river Tyne, and then as a means of transport for people. Only a few miles away from the bridge I stood on in 1952 was the line that connected Liverpool to Manchester, which when it opened in 1830 was the world's first railway to carry passengers.
Railways were Britain's great technological gift to the world. Asia had its first line in 1853, when Bombay was connected to Thane, a town a few miles inland and usefully placed as a railhead for the cotton crop unloaded from bullock carts for onward shipment to the docks. Railways were opened in Australia the next year, and in Japan (from Tokyo to Yokohoma) in 1872. China made a false start; in 1876, a short experimental line powered by British locomotives was viewed with such suspicion and hostility that it was torn up and dumped on the island then known as Formosa. But China, too, came around. By 1884 a subject of the Celestial Empire could travel from Beijing to Mukden behind a steam locomotive. Railways made nations more real—more approachable, knowable and exploitable—to the people who lived in them. They bound up the nation-state with hoops of steel. In 1869, the final spike was hammered into the railway that crossed the U.S., from sea to shining sea. In 1901, Russia opened the Trans-Siberian, 9,300 kilometers from Moscow to Vladivostok, then (and still) the world's longest line.
In this way, certain artificial sights and sounds became universal, known to every continent except Antarctica: the hiss of high-pressure steam, the ticking of the station clock, the guard's whistle, the bookstall, the refreshment room, the timetable (the railways made time, time that was accurate to the minute, a new necessity). Inside the train, once it departed, came the global familiarity of the click-clack that carried the carriage over the rail joints. The noise and dash of trains became a spectacle in a Bengal paddy field just as much as in a Scottish glen—a plume of smoke, a far-off whistle, and with them the idea, common to crofter and rice farmer, that now there was a world elsewhere.
Today the world has 1.2 million route kilometers of railway. There was a time when that number seemed bound to shrink. Railways, as a means of passenger transport, fell almost completely from favor in the U.S. In Europe, branch lines closed. In Argentina, pampas grass grew over the tracks that once carried wheat and beef to the coast. The road, the car, the truck, the airport, the plane: their victory looked inevitable. What denied that victory—what revitalized railways and made them new again—were innovations made in Japan, where new lines dedicated to high-speed passenger trains were built in the 1960s. Europe copied the idea. In France, Italy, Germany and Spain, they are still building them.
So railways should be ordinary, as matter-of-fact as freeways or departure lounges; utilitarian transport, merely usable. Some would say that their most glorious aspect has gone. Outside China, the last country to build them, steam locomotives have almost entirely vanished, though their eerie afterlife persists in models and children's books. That fact may tell us something about why the romance lingers. Is it a coincidence that the world's new child-hero, Harry Potter, travels to boarding school by train? Is it a coincidence that this train, the famous Hogwarts Express, is pulled by a steam engine?
Railways invaded the public imagination early, and never left it. Something more than nostalgia keeps them there—something to do with speed near the ground and the temporary human community that comprises the train just above it; something to do with the passing parade of landscape and cityscape seen from surprising angles, often quite intimately (bathrooms, people asleep in back gardens); something to do with steel squealing against steel, and the great paraphernalia of terminuses and junctions. In the novel Dombey and Son, published in 1848, Charles Dickens wrote of a train at speed:
"Through the hollow, on the height, by the heath, by the orchard, by the park, by the garden, over the canal, across the river, where the sheep are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is floating, where the dead are lying, where the factory is smoking, where the stream is running, where the villages cluster, where the great cathedral rises, where the bleak moor lies, and the wild breeze smoothes or ruffles it at its inconstant will; away with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, and no trace to leave behind but dust and vapour; like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death!"
This is the kind of poetic prose that cars have never inspired, and aircraft rarely. It's by no means confined to the English novel; you catch the same tone on the same subject in art forms as varied as the fiction of Emile Zola, the poetry of W.H. Auden, the films of Satyajit Ray, the songs of Woody Guthrie.
Perhaps in the end the appeal is undefinable, but it has its odd effects. About 20 years ago, when I worked for a London newspaper in India, a friend who worked for Indian Railways told me of a mystery that was troubling sections of the Indian government. Many groups of men traveling from Britain wanted to see locomotive sheds; some of these locomotive sheds were close to the Pakistan border and therefore in sensitive military zones. Memos went between intelligence officers, the Home Ministry, the Foreign Ministry. Who were these men? Subtext: might they be spies? Answer: no, Britain contained a number of these strange people. They were known as railway enthusiasts and looking at trains was all they wanted to do.
You will still see them—in China, Japan and Vietnam, as well as in India. They come on special package tours. They will be in a crowd—men with cameras strapped to their middle-aged or elderly bodies, waiting at the end of the station platform. The Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, these will have passed them by. They are chasing a different kind of poetry. Soon it will arrive, just as it did in their memories long ago beside a bridge in England.
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