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"I'm the last of the soot and scum brigade"
Attend with us to trains – the mournful whistles, the powerful chugging, the speedy, rhythmic movement. We see people longing for trains, chasing trains, looking out of trains, lamenting the loss of steam and the slow trains waiting to take us to better places, and we hear all these musicians imitating the train sounds.
I enjoyed the cheeky syncopation of ‘Let it rain! Who cares?’ and the beautiful passage from ‘Ordered South’: ‘thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations’–and all those harmonicas imitating lonesome whistles blowing. Thanks for another fascinating programme.
Ah, the gravelly Johnny Cash himself!
There’s going to be a conference in France next year about trains in literature and it’s going to take place in … a train! It sounds fun and I had thought about doing something on Stevenon’s “Across The Plains”, but I see that the deadline has already passed. Station To Station: Colloque Nomade UHA Mulhouse: Station to Station Call for Papers! –English Version
Too bad. I’d like to have done something on Stevenson and trains too – so many references, not least in The Wrong Box, where so much depends on trains, as vehicles of farce.