Trains And Society

It is often difficult for someone living in modern society to think about what it must have been like for a community even a while back in history. Take travel, for instance. One hundred-and-fifty years ago, it would have been a very long journey indeed to travel 50 miles because the only transport was a horse and carriage.

Trains And Society

Country people would talk about having been to the capital as we would now talk about going to the other side of the world - a once in a life time trip.

In those days, people married school friends and (distant) relatives because they did not know anyone else. How could they? Then came the bicycle and it opened up the whole county to ordinary people.

Not long afterwards, came the train and the railway networks and all of a sudden, people were not restricted to their village or county any more.

Some countries are still struggling to build a railroad network like Western Europe and America had 100 years ago. Some have even given up trying. If you go to those countries, you will get a taste of what it must have been like 150 years ago, although these places do obviously have the benefit of buses and cars.

Once you have thought about society in those days, give a little thought to the trains themselves. They were slower and smellier for sure, but some of them captured the imagination of those early travellers and the memory still seems to linger on in people's collective consciousness.

Think about the great steam trains of the Thirties. They were huge, majestic beasts with incredible power for those days, hurtling along national routes at 50-60 miles per hour!

Famous steam engines, the like of which will never be seen again: the speed of The Flying Scotsman, the luxury of the Orient Express with its sumptuous dining carriages and Stephenson's Rocket a hundred years before them, which set the design standards for nearly all subsequent steam locomotives - what people must have thought of those trains.

Cyclists can do 30-40 mph now, but then, in those days! Wow! Some passengers literally thought that such speed could be breath-taking.

Nowadays, we are spoiled, but there are still train museums where you can go to try to understand part of the awe that our ancestors, only our grandparents or great-grandparents, must have felt. It really was not that long ago - only 30 years before Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon!

An alternative to train museums is a model railway. Did you have a toy train set at home as a child? I did in the fifties. They went out of style in the Seventies and Eighties, but train sets for kids are making a come-back now with a vengeance. People seem to have become nostalgic for those huge old trains of the Thirties and electric train sets once again.

Do you remember the great train sets? They had names like Hornby, Lionel, Marx and Marklin and you could assemble the electrified track into any configuration you pleased. We had Hornby train set track running around our living room, in and out from under chairs and tables every Sunday afternoon.

Unfortunately, most children will never have those memories in the future because the old train sets for kids (and adults alike) with their model stations and accessories are very expensive now and most of the cheaper train sets like Christmas train sets, and Thomas train sets are just rubbish.

However, if you can afford a Lionel train set, say, an American Flyer or a Hornby Flying Scotsman Express, one day your children will be writing an article like this one in praise of the days of their youth when they played as kids with replicas of trains that drove the industrial revolution and changed villagers' lives forever.