railway

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.

Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.[On British railway dining cars]

What happens when a leader misses his steps on the ladder is what happens when a train misses the rail. Be on track.

Once upon a time,there was a Zen signat every small railway crossing in AmericaStop. Look. And listen.

The operating management, providing as it does for the care of near thirty thousand miles of railway, is far more important than that for construction in which there is comparatively little doing.