"Still trying not leave a trail, we didn't rent a broom but boarded a train for Cambridge. I like those puffy little locomotives, the genial conductors, the compartments where people mind their own business and read their own newspapers unless perchance you fall into an interesting conversation, the beautiful countryside through which you steam, even the meat pies you can buy at the stops. Ginny does too, I think. In any case, we felt rather jolly as we chugged north to our meeting."
-Operation Luna, 20, p. 182.
In 1894:
"The train was almost familiar, not very different from the carriages of British railways anno 1954, which gave Whitcomb occasion for sardonic remarks about inviolable traditions. In a couple of hours it let them off at a sleepy village station among carefully tended flower gardens, where they engaged a buggy to drive them to the Wyndham estate."
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 4, p. 25.
It seems appropriate that time travelers, having traveled sixty years into their past, should then travel in a timelessly familiar railway carriage - like the "anachronistic" hotels where they sometimes meet. See:
Anachronisms
Solid Anachronisms And Abstract Space-Time
Antiques
Out Of The Past
The Bookshop
Poul Anderson obviously writes as an American who has visited and appreciated England. I am checking through his A Midsummer Tempest for steam trains.
Later: Although A Midsummer Tempest has steam trains in an alternative seventeenth century, it does not seem to have any description of a railway journey. Correct me if I am wrong. In any case, it would have been a completely different experience from those enjoyed by the Matucheks and the Time Patrol agents in their respective timelines.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And this brings up nostalgic memories of how I made a point of taking the train from London to York myself during one of my visits to the UK! Precisely because of how I could see more of England that way.
If my memory is correct, we should understand the trains seen in A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST as being more primitive than those seen in OPERATION LUNA and "The Time Patrol." Because they had only recently been invented in the 1600's of that timeline.
I suppose trains were still being used in the OPERATION books universe because of how useful they were for transporting numbers of people or shipping goods in BULK.
Ad astra! Sean
To American eyes, British trains were always rather toy-like. The rail gauge is the same in both countries (4ft8inch) but the 'loading gauge' is much larger in the US, so the trains are too.
Also, British passenger cars for a long time retained much more of the heritage of the stagecoach than American ones did, with compartments that opened directly onto the station platform and no corridor.
Or toilets, until well into the second generation of train travel. Queen Victoria had one on her special train the 1850's, but until the 1870's her ladies-in-waiting had to scramble out and use a bush for privacy at the stops.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As always, interesting!
Ad astra! Sean
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