Rail Station Quotes

An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end. The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him--man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to--oh, stop it!

Here in China, no task is ever deemed impossible, no demand too extreme, no deadline too tight. There’s always someone younger, scrappier, hungrier, willing to work harder, faster, longer. Need a high-speed rail station in nine hours? Or a 1,300-ton bridge in a day and half? Not

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.

After the train started he had stood on the rear platform and watched the station and the water tower grow smaller and smaller and the rails crossed by the ties narrowed toward a point where the station and the water tower stood now minute and tiny in the steady clicking that was taking him away.

The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no anticipatory roar and clamour, a dark and sinuous body curved into view against the shadows far down the high-banked track, and with no sound but the rush of the cleft wind and the clock like tick of the rails, moved towards the bridge - it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them, which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an instant the successive rows of trees and caused Gloria to draw back instinctively to the far side of the road. The light was tepid - the temperature of warm blood... The clicking blended suddenly with itself in a rush of even sound, and then, elongating in sombre elasticity, the thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the lurid shaft of fire it cast into the solemn river alongside. Then it contracted swiftly, sucking in its sound until it left only a reverberant echo, which died upon the farther bank.

Ptraci didn’t just derail the train of thought, she ripped up the rails, burned the stations, and melted the bridges for scrap.

He disappeared into the century-old house, returning with three beers and a plate of what appeared to be bacon-chip cookies. Given the choice, I grabbed one of the bottles and leaned against the railing, waiting impatiently as Jeff and Helen filled us in on the latest werewolf gossip, most of which centered around who was sneaking into bed—or into the woods, or the backseat, or in one case the middle of the gas station parking lot—with whom. Werewolves treated sex like a professional sporting event, occasionally with spectators and cheerleaders.

Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?' Worries Forget your worries All the stations full of cracks tilted along the way The telegraph wires they hang from The grimacing poles that gesticulate and strangle them The world stretches lengthens and folds in like an accordion tormented by a sadistic hand In the cracks of the sky the locomotives in anger Flee And in the holes, The whirling wheels the mouths the voices And the dogs of misfortune that bark at our heels The demons are unleashed Iron rails Everything is off-key The broun-roun-roun of the wheels Shocks Bounces We are a storm under a deaf man's skull... 'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?' Hell yes, you're getting on my nerves you know very well we're far away Overheated madness bellows in the locomotive Plague, cholera rise up like burning embers on our way We disappear in the war sucked into a tunnel Hunger, the whore, clings to the stampeding clouds And drops battle dung in piles of stinking corpses Do like her, do your job 'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?

Madam, My sincere thanks for your offer to speak to the tenants regarding the drainage issues. However, since you are already burdened with many demands, I have sent my brother, Weston, to handle the problem. He will arrive at Eversby Priory on Wednesday, and stay for a fortnight. I have lectured him at length about gentlemanly conduct. If he causes you a moment’s distress, wire me and it will be resolved immediately. My brother will arrive at the Alton rail station at noon on Saturday. I do hope you’ll send someone to collect him, since I feel certain no one else will want him. Trenear P.S. Did you really dye the shawl black? My Lord, Amid the daily tumult of construction, which is louder than an army corps of drums, your brother’s presence will likely go unnoticed. We will fetch him on Wednesday. Lady Trenear P.S. Why did you send me a shawl so obviously unsuitable for mourning? In response to Kathleen’s letter, a telegram was delivered from the village post office on the morning of West’s scheduled arrival. Madam, You won’t be in mourning forever. Trenear

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities.

As we start the journey, translating hand over hand along the rails, I notice again how much damage has been done to the outside of the station by micrometeoroids and orbital debris. It’s remarkable to see the pits in the metal handrails going all the way through like bullet holes. I’m shocked again to see them.

The train station is the ideal scenario for greetings and farewells. The car is too banal. What does it mean to set off in a car? Nothing. The airport is too exhausting and impersonal, the plane itself remote, unseen, the barriers and security disturbing. Here the powerful beast of the locomotive thrusts its nose under the great arch of the station.

Even the judge who ruled in Wilkes’s case that general warrants were invalid found fame and admiration in America. Soon after his decision in Wilkes’s case, Lord Chief Justice Pratt inherited the title Lord Camden. As in Camden, New Jersey. And Camden, South Carolina. And the B&O Railroad’s Camden Station, on whose rail yards was later built the home of the Baltimore Orioles—Camden Yards.

Lots of nights I would go to bed early, too. Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep. You get so during the day you catch yourself suddenly standing still and waiting and listening. You are like a little boy at the railroad station, ready to go away on the train, which hasn't come yet. You look way up the track, but can't see the little patch of black smoke yet. You fidget around, but all at once you stop in the middle of your fidgeting, and listen. You can't hear it yet. Then you go and kneel down in your Sunday clothes in the cinders, for which your mother is going to snatch you bald-headed, and put your ear to the rail and listen for the first soundless rustle which will come in the rail long before the little black patch begins to grow on the sky. You get so you listen for night, long before it comes over the horizon, and long, long before it comes charging and stewing and thundering to you like a big black locomotive and the black cars grind to a momentary stop and the porter with the black, shining face helps you up the steps, and says, "Yassuh, little boss, yassuh.

One such evening Burnham led a tour of the fair aboard an electric launch for a group that included John Root’s widow, Dora, and a number of foreign emissaries. Burnham loved escorting friends and dignitaries through the grounds but sought always to orchestrate the journeys so that his friends saw the fair the way he believed it should be seen, with the buildings presented from a certain perspective, in a particular order, as if he were still back in his library showing drawings instead of real structures. He had tried to impose his aesthetic will on all the fair’s visitors by insisting during the first year of planning that the number of entrances to Jackson Park be limited to a few and that these be situated so that people had to enter first through the Court of Honor, either through a large portal at the rail station on the west side of the park or an entry on the east from the exposition wharf.

Whatever the final cost of HS2, all those tens of billions could clearly buy lots of things more generally useful to society than a quicker ride to Birmingham. Then there is all the destruction of the countryside. A high-speed rail line offers nothing in the way of charm. It is a motorway for trains. It would create a permanent very noisy, hyper-visible scar across a great deal of classic British countryside, and disrupt and make miserable the lives of hundreds of thousands of people throughout its years of construction. If the outcome were something truly marvellous, then perhaps that would be a justifiable price to pay, but a fast train to Birmingham is never going to be marvellous. The best it can ever be is a fast train to Birmingham. Remarkably, the new line doesn’t hook up to most of the places people might reasonably want to go to. Passengers from the north who need to get to Heathrow will have to change trains at Old Oak Common, with all their luggage, and travel the last twelve miles on another service. Getting to Gatwick will be even harder. If they want to catch a train to Europe, they will have to get off at Euston station and make their way half a mile along the Euston Road to St Pancras. It has actually been suggested that travelators could be installed for that journey. Can you imagine travelling half a mile on travelators? Somebody find me the person who came up with that notion. I’ll get the horsewhip. Now here’s my idea. Why not keep the journey times the same but make the trains so comfortable and relaxing that people won’t want the trip to end? Instead, they could pass the time staring out the window at all the gleaming hospitals, schools, playing fields and gorgeously maintained countryside that the billions of saved pounds had paid for. Alternatively, you could just put a steam locomotive in front of the train, make all the seats inside wooden and have it run entirely by volunteers. People would come from all over the country to ride on it. In either case, if any money was left over, perhaps a little of it could be used to fit trains with toilets that don’t flush directly on to the tracks, so that when I sit on a platform at a place like Cambridge or Oxford glumly eating a WH Smith sandwich I don’t have to watch blackbirds fighting over tattered fragments of human waste and toilet paper. It is, let’s face it, hard enough to eat a WH Smith sandwich as it is.

AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

And at this very moment, like a miracle, the rail-bus appeared. We waved our arms frantically, hardly daring to hope that it would stop. It did stop. We scrambled thankfully on board. That is the irony of travel. You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the Equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns—and finds you sleepy, hungry and dull. The Equator is just another valley; you aren’t sure which and you don’t much care. Quito is just another railroad station, with fuss about baggage and taxis and tips. And the only comforting reality, amidst all this picturesque noisy strangeness, is to find a clean pension run by Czech refugees and sit down in a cozy Central European parlor to a lunch of well-cooked Wiener Schnitzel.

Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks. Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons -- just to make it a better public." Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using "white" beach areas -- the best beaches -- by a system Shapiro calls "flagging"; the handful of Negro lifeguards [...] were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that "Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks." Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently -- and the Governor never raised the matter again.

I get off at Witney. I'm part of the Friday-evening commuter throng, just another wage slave amongst the hot, tired masses, looking forward to getting home and sitting outside with a cold beer, dinner with the kids, an early night. It might just be the gin, but it feels indescribably good to be swept along with the crowd, everyone phone-checking, fishing in pockets for rail passes. I'm taken back, way back to the first summer we lived on Blenheim Road, when I used to rush home from work every night, desperate to get down the steps and out of the station, half running down the street. Tom would be working from home and I'd barely be through the door before he was taking my clothes off. I find myself smiling about it even now, the anticipation of it: heat rising to my cheeks as I skipped down the road, biting my lip to stop myself from grinning, my breath quickening, thinking of him and knowing he'd be counting the minutes until I got home, too.

I had abandoned Elana; I deserved her uncertainty. I closed my eyes and focused on her touch. Perhaps she wouldn't have understood had I tried to explain it to her, but to me Elana was not only Elana--she was the sad-eyed love of mine who used to bag groceries at Woodley's in Buffalo; she was the sweet one who always sat across from me on the city bus in Niagara Falls; she was the girl I'd picked up hitchhiking in Mobile and dropped off in New Orleans, brash, full of sarcastic humor, but truly lonely and scared; she was the one I'd nabbed pinching Newports for her dad from the Marathon station I'd worked at in Bakersfield (I'd softened and paid for the pack myself); yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sisters how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars-she was all of them, and she was so much more that was just her that I still didn't know.

All this is happening right next to you; you can almost touch it, but it's invisible ... At the big stations the loading and unloading of the dirty faces takes place far, far from the passenger platform and is seen only by switchmen and roadbed inspectors ... And you, hurrying along the platform with your children, your suitcases, and your string bags, are too busy to look closely ... The train starts - and a hundred crowded prisoner destinies, tormented hearts, are borne along the same snaky rails, behind the same smoke, past the same fields, posts, and haystacks as you ...You are dissatisfied because there are four of you in your compartment and it is crowded. And could you possibly believe ... that in the same size compartment as yours, but up ahead in that zak car, there are fourteen people? ... And if there are thirty? And ... why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water ... for enemies of the people? It isn't done especially to torture people. A sentenced prisoner is a laboring soldier of socialism, so why should he be tortured? They need him for construction work. But ... there is no reason in the world to treat him so well that people out in freedom would envy him ... Look around you ... Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this ...

Congress displayed contempt for the city's residents, yet it retained a fondness for buildings and parks. In 1900, the centennial of the federal government's move to Washington, many congressmen expressed frustration that the proud nation did not have a capital to rival London, Paris, and Berlin. The following year, Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District Committee, recruited architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to propose a park system. The team, thereafter known as the McMillan Commission, emerged with a bold proposal in the City Beautiful tradition, based on the White City of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. Their plan reaffirmed L'Enfant's avenues as the best guide for the city's growth and emphasized the majesty of government by calling for symmetrical compositions of horizontal, neoclassical buildings of marble and white granite sitting amid wide lawns and reflecting pools. Eventually, the plan resulted in the remaking of the Mall as an open lawn, the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, and the building of Burnham's Union Station. Commissioned in 1903, when the state of the art in automobiles and airplanes was represented by the curved-dash Olds and the Wright Flyer, the station served as a vast and gorgeous granite monument to rail transportation.

we neared Liverpool’s Lime Street station, we passed through a culvert with walls that appeared to rise up at least thirty feet, high enough to block out the sun. They were as smooth as Navajo sandstone. This had been bored out in 1836 and had been in continuous use ever since, the conductor told me. “All the more impressive,” he said, “when you consider it was all done by Irish navvies working with wheelbarrows and picks.” I couldn’t place his accent and asked if he himself was Irish, but he gave me a disapproving look and told me he was a native of Liverpool. He had been talking about the ragged class of nineteenth-century laborers, usually illiterate farmhands, known as “navvies”—hard-drinking and risk-taking men who were hired in gangs to smash the right-of-way in a direct line from station to station. Many of them had experienced digging canals and were known by the euphemism “navigators.” They wore the diminutive “navvy” as a term of pride. Polite society shunned them, but these magnificent railways would have been impossible without their contributions of sweat and blood. Their primary task was cleaving the hillsides so that tracks could be laid on a level plain for the weak locomotive engines of the day. Teams of navvies known as “butty gangs” blasted a route with gunpowder and then hauled the dirt out with the same kind of harness that so many children were then using in the coal mines: a man at the back of a full wheelbarrow would buckle a thick belt around his waist, then attach that to a rope dangling from the top of the slope and allow himself to be pulled up by a horse. This was how the Lime Street approach had been dug out, and it was dangerous. One 1827 fatality happened as “the poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body,” as a Liverpool paper told it. The navvies wrecked old England along with themselves, erecting a bizarre new kingdom of tracks. In a passage from his 1848 novel Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens gives a snapshot of the scene outside London: Everywhere

At some point I tried willing things along, mentally focusing on a rapid delivery. That didn't work. I got up to walk around-walking is supposed to help you progress-then quickly got back in the chair. “Argh!!!!!” I groaned. And other stuff. The way I saw it, my baby should have been out by now, shaking hands with his dad and passing around cigars to the nurses. But he apparently had other plans. Labor continued very slowly. Very slowly. We were in that room for eighteen hours. That was a lot of contractions. And a lot of PG versions of curse words, along with the X-rated kind. I may have invented a whole new language. Somewhere around the twelve-hour mark, Chris asked if I’d mind if he changed the music, since our songs had been playing on repeat for what surely seemed like a millennium. “Sure,” I said. He switched to the radio and found a country station. That lasted a song or two. “I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I need Enya. I’m tuned in to it, and it calms me…ohhhhh!” “Okay. No problem,” he said calmly, though not quite cheerfully. I’m sure it was torture. Chris would take short breaks, walking out into the waiting room where both sides of our family were waiting to welcome their first grandchild and nephew. He’d look at his dad and give a little nod. “She’s okay,” he told everyone. Then he’d wipe a little tear away from his eye and walk back to me. Chris said later that watching me give birth was probably the most powerless feeling he’d ever had. He knew I was in pain and yet couldn’t do a whit about it. “It’s like watching your wife get stabbed and not being able to do anything to help.” But when he came into the room with me, his eyes were clear and he seemed confident and even upbeat. It was the thing he did when talking to me from the combat zone, all over again: he wasn’t about to do anything that would make me worry. I, on the other hand, made no secret of what I was feeling. An alien watermelon was ripping my insides out. And it hurt. Whoooh! Suddenly one of the contractions peaked way beyond where the others had been. Bubba had finally decided it was time to say hello to the world. I grabbed the side rail on the bed and struggled to remain conscious, if not exactly calm. Part of me was thinking, You should remember this, Taya. This is natural childbirth. This is beautiful. This is what God intended. You should enjoy this precious moment and remember it always. Another part of me was telling that part to shut the bleep up. I begged for mercy-for painkillers.

All the many successes and extraordinary accomplishments of the Gemini still left NASA’s leadership in a quandary. The question voiced in various expressions cut to the heart of the problem: “How can we send men to the moon, no matter how well they fly their ships, if they’re pretty helpless when they get there? We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, double-teaming the spacecraft, starting, stopping, and restarting engines; we’ve done all that. But these guys simply cannot work outside their ships without exhausting themselves and risking both their lives and their mission. We’ve got to come up with a solution, and quick!” One manned Gemini mission remained on the flight schedule. Veteran Jim Lovell would command the Gemini 12, and his space-walking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, who built on the experience of the others to address all problems with incredible depth and finesse. He took along with him on his mission special devices like a wrist tether and a tether constructed in the same fashion as one that window washers use to keep from falling off ledges. The ruby slippers of Dorothy of Oz couldn’t compare with the “golden slippers” Aldrin wore in space—foot restraints, resembling wooden Dutch shoes, that he could bolt to a work station in the Gemini equipment bay. One of his neatest tricks was to bring along portable handholds he could slap onto either the Gemini or the Agena to keep his body under control. A variety of space tools went into his pressure suit to go along with him once he exited the cabin. On November 11, 1966, the Gemini 12, the last of its breed, left earth and captured its Agena quarry. Then Buzz Aldrin, once and for all, banished the gremlins of spacewalking. He proved so much a master at it that he seemed more to be taking a leisurely stroll through space than attacking the problems that had frustrated, endangered, and maddened three previous astronauts and brought grave doubts to NASA leadership about the possible success of the manned lunar program. Aldrin moved down the nose of the Gemini to the Agena like a weightless swimmer, working his way almost effortlessly along a six-foot rail he had locked into place once he was outside. Next came looping the end of a hundred-foot line from the Agena to the Gemini for a later experiment, the job that had left Dick Gordon in a sweatbox of exhaustion. Aldrin didn’t show even a hint of heavy breathing, perspiration, or an increased heartbeat. When he spoke, his voice was crisp, sharp, clear. What he did seemed incredibly easy, but it was the direct result of his incisive study of the problems and the equipment he’d brought from earth. He also made sure to move in carefully timed periods, resting between major tasks, and keeping his physical exertion to a minimum. When he reached the workstation in the rear of the Gemini, he mounted his feet and secured his body to the ship with the waist tether. He hooked different equipment to the ship, dismounted other equipment, shifted them about, and reattached them. He used a unique “space wrench” to loosen and tighten bolts with effortless skill. He snipped wires, reconnected wires, and connected a series of tubes. Mission Control hung on every word exchanged between the two astronauts high above earth. “Buzz, how do those slippers work?” Aldrin’s enthusiastic voice came back like music. “They’re great. Great! I don’t have any trouble positioning my body at all.” And so it went, a monumental achievement right at the end of the Gemini program. Project planners had reached all the way to the last inch with one crucial problem still unsolved, and the man named Aldrin had whipped it in spectacular fashion on the final flight. Project Gemini was

Terminus stations, like airports, are the junction, the place where a temporary reality fades into the continuing consensus one—as well as being where the rails run out—so they are transitional to the power of two: liminally liminal. In such an enfolded location, surely, there must be clues to almost any mystery, spat out on to the littoral plain of human passage.

He was going to kiss her. She was going to let him. Falco’s face blurred in the darkness as he closed the distance between them. And then…it wasn’t Falco she was about to kiss. It was Luca. She lunged backward in her seat, causing the gondola to lurch to one side. Falco’s eyes snapped open. “What happened?” Cass had no idea what to say. “I--I thought I saw something,” she stammered out. Falco glanced around, as if reaffirming that it would be impossible to see anything in the blackness under the bridge. “A vampire?” His voice was thick with sarcasm. Cass looked away. “Forget it. You wouldn’t understand.” “Oh. I think I understand.” Falco turned slowly away from Cass. He dragged his fingers across the shiny black wood as he moved toward the back of the boat. “Forgive me, Signorina. I didn’t mean to overstep my station.” “No. I--it’s not that,” Cass said. Her heart was trembling in her chest. Falco didn’t answer. He vaulted over the side of the boat and headed for the steps leading up to the bridge. Cass followed him, struggling to lift her skirts over the gondola’s edge. She fumbled her way up the uneven steps, feeling the dampness of the stones seeping through the bottom of her suede shoes. Falco stood in the middle of the bridge, his forearms resting on the railing. He stared down at the water so intently that Cass thought maybe it was his turn to see murderers and poisonous serpents beneath the surface. But no, Falco didn’t deal in superstition. Cass cleared her throat. Her chest felt as though there was a giant fist around it, squeezing. “Lately I always think I’m doing the wrong thing.” Falco nodded, keeping his eyes locked on the water. His jaw was tight. “You should stop thinking so much. Do what feels right.

justice for Mary and Freddie, then not only would he be unstable for the station of Duke, but he would be unworthy to court a young woman of virtue such as Miss Miller. It was time to stop railing against the world for treating him unfairly and start thinking about what he might do to improve the world.

Slightly further afield, you will find Baroque palaces such as Nymphenberg and Schlossheim, with wonderful parks and art galleries. On a slightly darker note, Dachau Concentration Camp is around 10 miles from town. Trains go there from Munich’s main train station every ten minutes and the journey takes less than 15 minutes. Transport in Munich is well organised with a network of trains – S‐Bahn is the suburban rail; U‐Bahn is underground and there are trams and buses. The S‐Bahn connects Munich Airport with the city at frequent intervals depending on the time of day or night. Munich is especially busy during Oktoberfest, a beer festival that began in the 19th century to celebrate a royal wedding, and also in the Christmas market season, which runs from late November to Christmas Eve. Expect wooden toys and ornaments, cakes and Gluwien. The hot mulled wine stands require a deposit for each mug. This means that locals stand chatting at the stalls while drinking. As a result, the solo traveller is never alone. The downside of Munich is that it is a commercial city, one that works hard and sometimes has little patience for tourists. Natives of Munich also have a reputation for being a little snobbish and very brand conscious. To read: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Narrated by death himself, this novel tells of a little girl sent to a foster family in 1939. She reads The Grave Diggers Handbook each evening with her foster father and, as her love of reading grows, she steals a book from a Nazi book burning. From this, her renegade life begins.

From that day onwards I spent a lot of time on Park Bridge, and soon became aware of other boys with similar interests leaning out over the engines as they slowed down on their way into the goods yard, or cruised at speed further out on their way up the East Coast main line between Edinburgh and London. For Edinburgh was a rail centre, and I lived at the eastern end of a great loop of lines punctuated by stations, depots, tunnels, repair yards and goods terminals. I could watch the flagship engines of the London and North Eastern Railway rush by, a long procession of carriages drawn after them as they headed for Edinburgh Waverley - the company's very own station and a mecca for train lovers - or catch the smaller, older engines at the head of suburban and country trains. They were all trains, and that was enough for now.

A fifteen-minute walk later I'm aboard the Long Island Rail Road, just another head in the morning cattle drive to New York City......On reaching the station, the cattle rise to their feet, driven toward the exits by instinct and caffeine. I drift along for the ride, floating on a wave of group dynamics toward Seventh Avenue.

I sigh, peering out of the window. We’re far out of central London now and I scan the streets, trying to get my bearings. We’re getting nearer to Julian’s resting place. I recognise an old police station, converted into cheap flats. This part of London feels darker than Mayfair. It’s as though the streetlights don’t shine as brightly. Cheaper models, not as many. I like it. Every time I come here, on a certain level, I relax. It almost feels more like home than Mayfair. Mayfair is who I want to be, Hayes is who I am. My veins are the dark streets, pulsing with traffic. There’s wreckage all around: craterous potholes, crumpled railings, abandoned cars, derelict homes. Nothing’s ever repaired. It’s all broken. The poverty’s inescapable. The air perpetually stinks.

In Minnesota, they were seizing cars from every siding, from the Mesabi Range, from the ore mines of Paul Larkin where the cars had stood waiting for a dribble of iron. They were pouring wheat into ore cars, into coal cars, into boarded stock cars that went spilling thin gold trickles along the track as they clattered off. They were pouring wheat into passenger coaches, over seats, racks and fixtures, to send it off, to get it moving, even if it went moving into trackside ditches in the sudden crash of breaking springs, in the explosions set off by burning journal boxes. They fought for movement, for movement with no thought of destination, for movement as such, like a paralytic under a stroke, struggling in wild, stiff, incredulous jerks against the realization that movement was suddenly impossible. There were no other railroads: James Taggart had killed them; there were no boats on the Lakes: Paul Larkin had killed them. There was only the single line of rail and a net of neglected highways. The trucks and wagons of waiting farmers started trickling blindly down the roads, with no maps, no gas, no feed for horses—moving south, south toward the vision of flour mills awaiting them somewhere, with no knowledge of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them—moving, to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges. One farmer was found, half a mile south of the wreck of his truck, lying dead in a ditch, face down, still clutching a sack of wheat on his shoulders. Then rain clouds burst over the prairies of Minnesota; the rain went eating the wheat into rot at the waiting railroad stations; it went hammering the piles spilled along the roads, washing gold kernels into the soil.

Not far from Ten House, a footbridge has been thrown across the swamp. There Kozuka encounters a piece of chewing gum stuck to the underside of one of the bamboo poles used as bridge rails. The chewing gum is used. The question is: Has a local stuck the piece of gum there, or was it a GI? Onoda and his men know that Filipino villagers don't chew gum-that would be highly improbable. But they have observed that this vice is common among American soldiers. So are there American soldiers still stationed on Lubang? How long has the piece of gum been there? Days? Months? How does gum behave when exposed to tropical conditions? On closer inspection, and with a little imagination, it is possible to see the imprint of a molar, and beside it that of another tooth, slightly deformed. Everything suggests a wisdom tooth, but do Americans have wisdom teeth? Are they at all like other men? Are their voices not louder than those of the normal run of human beings? And is it perhaps conceivable that the gum was deliberately placed there, to mislead the guerrilla fighters? What to do? Akatsu is inclined to try chewing it to gain a sense of what this gum is like. What does it feel like, to be chewing gum? What do Americans feel—if, that is, they are even capable of feeling? Onoda orders the gum to be left exactly where they found it.

I learned that the Canadian government is very supportive of their native artists. As a rule, at least half of the play list played on Canadian radio stations must be of national origin and any non-Canadian headlining artists must include at least one national act on their bill. This kind of support has established Canada as a creatively fertile ground for some of music’s greatest artists. The

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They were chased toward the rail road station. Romanian soldiers chased them to hurry, to fill up the cattle wagons. By the evening, the trains fully packed, sides bolted - they were on their way to concentration camps. On that first day, my friend Lola and her entire family left, among so many others. As we had our knapsacks ready to go, we went to a different location in the Ghetto, because next day was our turn to leave for Transnistria. As we had seen on the first day what was happening, we three decided that it was better to try to leave later. Thus, we made up our minds to go from place to place, maybe a miracle would still happen.

One day, the soldiers chased out everybody in the street where we were "Yudengasse" (Jew Street). My parents and myself took our sacks to go to the rail road station. While we were going with the rest of that day's contingent, half way to the station, a woman walked by and said: "They called your name at the certificate station." On the spur of the moment, I said to my parents: "You continue going. I am going back, get the certificate and will take you out." Nobody would have let all three of us go back without a permit. Of course, it was easier said than done. The military watched all along the roads and they said that Jews can go only one way - toward the rail road station, not back. I was a young girl, 21 years old and desperate to go look for that elusive piece of paper.

Zhengzhou East Station was one of the largest high-speed rail stations in the world. Its boarding platform was a vast, cavernous chamber of gleaming silver and white. A delicate latticework of metal beams crisscrossed high overhead beneath the high-domed ceiling. Caine knew those metal beams were studded with dozens of security cameras. As he meandered through the newsstands and food carts, he made sure to keep his face pointed down, out of view of the probing lenses above

I’m sorry for taking so long.” Tori straightened her shoulders as if readying herself for battle, then traipsed down the steps to the street. “I had a few last-minute details to see to.” Ben hurried around the back of the wagon to meet her and had opened his mouth to offer assurances that the delay was no problem when Lewis popped his head up. “About time! Sheesh, Ma. You took for-ev-er.” Ben cast a warning glance at the boy. “I’m sure whatever your ma was doing was important.” He turned back to Tori and gave her his most charming grin. “She’s worth waiting on.” Her lips tightened at that, but into a shape that looked more like disapproval than appreciation of a compliment. So much for his charm. “Yes, well . . . I suggest we delay no longer.” Tori lengthened her stride, giving him no chance to assist her into the wagon. She scrambled up the wheel spokes and onto the bench before he could even think about fitting his hands to her waist and hoisting her up. Unfortunate, that. Ben shrugged off his disappointment and moved forward to give his team a final check before climbing into the driver’s seat. Emma handed a large basket up to Tori and wished her farewell while Grace Mallory waved from behind the store railing. As he clucked to his Shires and set the wagon in motion, Ben grinned to himself. One of the best parts of this plan to call on area homesteaders was the sheer number of times they’d be required to enter and exit the wagon. Tori might have escaped him this time, but he’d have a couple dozen more chances to wrap his fingers around her slender waist.

Life was nothing but a bitter journey on the rails to nowhere. A series of horrible tacky stations, unexpected delays and, sometimes along the way, the odd devastation of a major derailment. That's what he had been - a major derailment on life's tortured track.

The journey into the vast unquiet universe, watched by faces in railway compartments, tolerant and incurious. In the nights Ravi curled up on luggage racks and slept to the soft beat of the rails. The names of railway stations changed, their scripts changed. Then on the road, up the high ranges, past hairpin bends in gasoline-perfumed buses. The roadway dust changed colour, sunrise and sunset changed places, directions were lost in an assailing infinity. The journey took him through cheerless suburbs, through streets of sordid trades, past cacti villages and lost townships of lepers, and ashramas where, in saffron beds, voluptuous swaminis lay in wait for nirvana.

Theodor Herzl was the leader the Zionists so desperately needed. Under Herzl the Zionist movement exploded onto the world scene as a force to be reckoned with. With his articulate manner, elegant dress, and regal demeanor, Herzl cut an impressive figure, charismatic and radiant. He was also tireless, working relentlessly to achieve his dream. He met with the grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire as early as 1896. Upon his return from Constantinople and arrival at the rail station in Sofia, Bulgaria, a mob of several hundred jubilant Jews engulfed the Viennese messiah. For surely he was the man who would finally deliver them a state of their own! They carried him off the train to a synagogue, where people insisted on kissing his hand.

Why was it that people always got involved in one’s life? If only one could manage things on the principle of the railways! Parallel tracks⁠—that was the thing. For a few miles you’d be running at the same speed. There’d be delightful conversation out of the windows; you’d exchange the omelette in your restaurant car for the vol-au-vent in theirs. And when you’d said all there was to say, you’d put on a little more steam, wave your hand, blow a kiss and away you’d go, forging ahead along the smooth, polished rails. But instead of that, there were these dreadful accidents; the points were wrongly set, the trains came crashing together; or people jumped on as you were passing through the stations and made a nuisance of themselves and wouldn’t allow themselves to be turned off.

To convince ourselves of the amazing variety of noises, it is enough to think of the rumble of thunder, the whistle of the wind, the roar of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the clatter of a trotting horse as it draws into the distance, the lurching jolts of a cart on pavings, and of the generous, solemn, white breathing of a nocturnal city; of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that can be made by the mouth of man without resorting to speaking or singing. Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways.

My second law of long-distance train travel is to get up early enough to use the shower before anyone else does, so you encounter it while it’s pristine. (The first is never to buy coffee at a train station.)

The old station, the one that stood when I arrived in 1926, was a Beaux-Arts marvel of pink granite and glass and steel that evoked not just travel by rail, but also travel through time: the splendor of an ancient Roman past, plus the possibility of a future where beauty and civic function are not just valued but understood to be in harmony.

Lieutenant Commander David Tarantino, MD, hurt, sore, pungent as an ashcan, limped several blocks to a Metro rail station. He paid the fare and boarded a train toward home. As he reflected on all that he’d seen and done, Dave noticed a woman staring at him from a few seats away. She studied his scrapes and bruises, the burns on his hands. Her gaze worked its way down his torn, stained uniform to his ruined shoes.

Spots of rain were falling but he couldn't see them. He had travelled by rail and walked from the station, making detours all the way: Blackwell's, his old college, anywhere, then north. Dusk had come early because of the trees.

On a per-mile basis, the completed section of the Second Avenue subway was the most expensive subway extension ever built anywhere in the world. Costs were high because of inefficient phasing and high real estate costs, powerful unions earning high wages and dictating costly work rules, and extensive regulations and environmental sensitivities. If the Second Avenue subway’s thirteen other planned stations are ever completed, the 8.5-mile line would be one of the world’s most expensive infrastructure projects, surpassing the $21 billion rail tunnel between England and France. Given the extraordinary cost and lengthy construction period, the Second Avenue subway will more than likely be the last subway line built in New York for generations to come.

On wet days Roger and Tom got out their clockwork trains and spread the rails all over the nursery floor. They built stations and goods yards and tunnels with bricks. It took a long time to get everything in running order and Connie and Nell and Anne were allowed to help if they did not offer too many suggestions. The boys found them quite useful (sometimes they were allowed to wind up the engines under careful supervision) and more often than not it was left to Connie and Nell and Anne to tidy up the mess when the game was over and the boys remembered that they had other important business to attend to.

When Enrico Fermi built the first nuclear reactor, he suspended the control rods from a rope tied to a balcony railing. In case something went wrong, next to the railing was stationed a distinguished physicist with an axe. This led to the probably apocryphal story that SCRAM stands for “Safety Control Rod Axe Man.

Gene Russianoff from the Straphangers Campaign said that because New York had not built a new subway line in half a century, subway riders had to deal with “elbow-in-the-ribs crowding that would violate Department of Agriculture guidelines for shipping cattle.” He argued, “If the region can raise $3.5 billion to spare tens of thousands of daily Long Island Rail Road commuters, we must find the resources to come to the rescue of the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers suffering from grossly inadequate subway service on the East Side.” Robert Paaswell, the director of City College’s transportation research center, explained that overcrowding on platforms and stairways causes people to fall and get jammed up as they try to get on and off trains. He warned that the problem could be especially dangerous for the elderly and disabled. Then he brought up a question that had not yet received any attention in the Second Avenue subway discussion: what would happen if an overcrowded Lexington Avenue–line subway station needed to be suddenly evacuated in the event of a terrorist attack?83

The question of how to get to Gatwick is what you might call a ‘wide context’ problem. It allows for vagueness and multiple right answers, and it doesn’t demand absolute adherence to any precise rules. There is no formula for the solution, it allows scope for all kinds of possible ‘rightish’ answers and all kinds of information can be taken into account when coming up with an answer. These are the problems we seem instinctively better equipped to solve, but which computers find hard. If I were to delve into my unconscious and uncover some of the variables at play in my brain when I next have to get to the airport, they might include ‘Is it raining?’, ‘How much luggage do I have?’, ‘How long am I going to be away for?’, ‘What is the average time via the M25 versus taking the A25?’, ‘What is the variance of journey time on the M25 versus the A25?’fn2 and ‘Does my flight leave from the North or South Terminal?’ If you think of getting to Gatwick as a narrow problem in the way your GPS does – a simple question of getting to the airport as quickly as possible – some of these factors may seem irrelevant, but they are all important in real life. The weather affects the traffic. If I am going away for two weeks rather than one night, it affects the cost of parking, and therefore the relative cost of going by train, car or taxi – and the amount of luggage I have. The variance of travel time on the M25 matters to whether it’s worth risking. And heavy luggage makes the train less appealing, especially if you are flying from the North Terminal, which is much further away from the rail station. It’s interesting that we find solving complex problems like this so easy – it suggests that our brains have evolved to answer ‘wide context’ problems because most problems we faced as we developed were of this type. Blurry ‘pretty good’ decision-making has simply proven more useful than precise logic.