Wolmar and Trains

[kevin_standlee]

I spent this evening at the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco listening to Christian Wolmar give a lecture about his new book about American railroads, The Great Railroad Revolution (titled The Great Railway Revolution in the UK). I enjoyed the talk, although I was amused that at a place called the Mechanics Institute they would have been so disorganized as to use a laptop with no charge to drive his presentation and then have to spend ten minutes fiddling around to find a power supply when the computer went to sleep for lack of juice. I also was somewhat put off by some of my fellow attendees, who seem to embody the attitude that there's been no good trains since 1950 or thereabouts and everything today is terrible. I got rather annoyed at the nitpicker (similar to the SF fan version) who, when I talked of the Union Pacific main line in front of my house in Fernley, said, "You mean the Central Pacific line."

I told him, "I could speak in footnotes if you insist, and call it the Union Pacific, ex-Southern Pacific, ex-Central Pacific, terminus of the Fernley & Lassen Railroad line, but I'm not going to do that, and I'm talking to Christian here, so hold your horses," and turned my back on him when he started to go into how technically the line was still Central Pacific up until not too long ago. Honestly, people, if you want to pretend that it's still 1949, leave me out of it.

Anyway, Wolmar's talk was good, and I was glad to be able to talk to him for a couple of minutes. I only wish I could have spent more time discussing various things railway/railroad with him. I tried to get a picture of the two of us together, but nobody else there seemed to be able to handle my camera phone, and the only photo came out terribly. I'm not going to post that one since Wolmar is running for the Labour Party nomination for Mayor of London and I wouldn't want anyone using that photo to make him look bad. Instead, here's the photo I took of him after the lecture:

The gathering broke up with me having just under an hour until the next train, so I walked down to AT&T Park and watched one inning of the Giants-Rockies game in the right field archway where you can walk in and watch the game for free through the fence. (If there is a crowd, there's a three-inning limit.) Then I made my way to Caltrain and rode down to Mountain View where I parked. I would have got home sooner, but a woman on the train asked me to walk her to her destination several blocks down Castro Street, and I was happy to oblige.

Now I need to get some sleep, because I still have to work tomorrow morning before heading off to Fernley sometime after Noon. I'm hoping that Thursday afternoon traffic is lighter than the usual getaway Friday stuff.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Another thought along these lines: It's good to be aware of history. It's bad to be enslaved by it, and I think some of these people are enslaved by this mistaken impression that the best is in the past, the present is terrible, and everything is always getting worse all the time. This attitude of course isn't just in the railfan community; it's everywhere. I think a lot of the flaws in our current political discourse in mainstream society includes some continuing sense of a pining for a past that never existed.

(I never could get into That 70's Show, for instance. I lived through it once, and didn't especially enjoy most of it.)

[nojay.livejournal.com]

"this mistaken impression that the best is in the past, the present is terrible, and everything is always getting worse all the time. This attitude of course isn't just in the railfan community; it's everywhere."

My main experience with train travel is in Japan where they have a couple of lovingly-maintained steam locomotives that run excursions every now and then. The rest of it is the Hayabusa, Mizuho and Sakura shinkansens running at 320km/hr meeting their timetables to the second. A few years back I was lucky enough to ride one of the older 0 series shinkansens, first introduced as "the future" in the far-off 1960s. The compartment I was in still had the brag display, an 8-segment LED speed indicator that showed its max speed to be about 210km/hr which is why this flagship had been demoted to the Kodama stopping service, the slowest of the shinkansens. You could tell how slow it was, it still had a dining car in the rack complete with a hot-food kitchen (unused). With modern shinkansens you have to be content with a trolley dolly selling bentos, coffee and green tea because you'll be at your destination before you could pick up your chopsticks at a sit-down meal.

[melchar.livejournal.com]

[only quoting the last half of Kipling's poem 'The King'] since it mentions nostalgia for the past AND trains =

"Good-bye, Romance!" the Skipper said;
"He vanished with the coal we burn;
Our dial marks full steam ahead,
Our speed is timed to half a turn.
Sure as the ferried barge we ply
'Twixt port and port. Romance, good-bye!"

"Romance!" the season-tickets mourn,
"~He~ never ran to catch his train,
But passed with coach and guard and horn --
And left the local -- late again!"
Confound Romance! . . . And all unseen
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.

His hand was on the lever laid,
His oil-can soothed the worrying cranks,
His whistle waked the snowbound grade,
His fog-horn cut the reeking Banks;
By dock and deep and mine and mill
The Boy-god reckless laboured still!

Robed, crowned and throned, he wove his spell,
Where heart-blood beat or hearth-smoke curled,
With unconsidered miracle,
Hedged in a backward-gazing world;
Then taught his chosen bard to say:
"Our King was with us -- yesterday!"