Railways Quotes

“The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“When you're traveling you need to take care of yourself to get by, you have to keep an eye on yourself and your place in the world. It means concentrating on yourself, thinking about yourself and looking after yourself. So when you travel all you really encounter is yourself, as if that were the whole point of it. When you're at home you simply are, you don't have to struggle with anything or achieve anything. You don't have to worry about the railways connections, and timetables, you don't need to experience any thrills or disappointments. You can put yourself to one side - and that's when you see the most.”
― Olga Tokarczuk

“A slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“Life is a train ride, and at the many stations along the route, people important to us debark, never to get aboard again, until by the end of our journey, we sit in a passenger car where most of the seats are empty. This truth saddens the doctor no less than it does other men and women who are given to reflection — although his sorrow is undeniably of a quality different from theirs.”
― Dean Koontz, False Memory

“You know (to adopt the easy or conversational style) that you and I belong to a happy minority. We are the sons of the hunters and the wandering singers, and from our boyhood nothing ever gave us greater pleasure than to stand under lonely skies in forest clearings, or to find a beach looking westward at evening over unfrequented seas. But the great mass of men love companionship so much that nothing seems of any worth compared with it. Human communion is their meat and drink, and so they use the railways to make bigger and bigger hives for themselves.”
― Hilaire Belloc, On Nothing and Kindred Subjects

“Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And here is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart runaway in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill, and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone forever!

From A Railway Carriage”
― Rbert Louis Stevenson

“Recently I met with the director of the London Ironstone railway," he said. For Kathleen's benefit, he explained, "It's a private company, owned by a friend. Tom Severin."
'We're in the same London club," West added.
Devon viewed the map critically before drawing a parallel line. "Severin wants to reduce distance on London Ironstone's existing Portsmouth route. He's also planning to relay the entire sixty-mile line, start to finish, with heavier rails to accommodate faster trains."
"Can he afford such a project?" West asked.
"He's already secured one million pounds."
West uttered a wordless exclamation.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Cold-Hearted Rake

“An der technischen Entwicklung der Dampfmaschine im 18. Jahrhundert läßt sich der Prozess der Emanzipation der modernen Produktionsweise von den Schranken der organischen Natur verfolgen.”
― Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century

“More coal, more smoke, more heat, more steam, more pressure, more speed. The engine raced forward streaming black smoke like a funerary ribbon rippling in the breeze.”
― Martin R Jackson : Running with Finn McCool

“The train is world in itself, a diminutive form of the culture of the country and its people.”
― Harmik Vaishnav, Coffee Beans

“Concrete arteries brought prosperity, like the historical iron horses galloping from coast to coast over the graves of the indigenous, but they were also digestive pathways, and a whole lot of shit ran off them.”
― Lilith Saintcrow, Spring's Arcana

“Railways, like Daleks, have difficulties in getting up hills.”
― Ian Marchant, Parallel Lines: Or, Journeys on the Railway of Dreams

“Look at the screws on the railways, even one of them is important, even one of them can change the fate of the train! There are such screws in your life, they are very small, but they carry the potential to have a huge impact on your destiny!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan