The Railways Quotes

“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]”
― Simon Bradley, The Railways: Nation, Network and People

“Yet all these perils are now routinely combined by the thousands who cycle in a dash to their local stations to catch the train to work, then pass the time in the carriage by making phone calls and catching old television shows on a tablet computer. Which may suggest that the risks of new technologies will always tend to be exaggerated, partly because danger makes a better story than safety, partly perhaps as a sort of displacement activity to avoid engaging with less far-fetched risks to health, such as those arising (say) from tempting things to eat and drink, or from a failure to take exercise at all.”
― Simon Bradley, The Railways: Nation, Network and People