» Railroad Tycoon II The Digital Antiquarian

Once upon a time, I could happily spend hours and hours with my Lionel locomotives. They were, back in that era at least, satisfyingly heavy, made out of the same good solid iron as the full-sized models they imitated; they even smoked the same as the real things when you dropped a bit of “smoke fluid” down the stack. I wiled away many an afternoon driving my trains around and around in circles, learning through trial and error just how fast I could take those corners before disaster struck. But for better or for worse, after I was given a Commodore 64 for Christmas in 1984, model railroading fell by the wayside pretty quickly. (How’s that for a parable of the modern homo digitalis?)

Nevertheless, and much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife, I’m always chomping at the bit to visit any train museum that happens to be within range, whether I’m in Dallas or Nuremberg, Odense or London. I look upon any opportunity to actually ride the rails even more favorably; I love me a vintage tourist railroad, no matter how cheesy. Heck, I still get a little thrill from boarding a train that serves merely as everyday public transportation, something that’s a lot more common here in Europe than it is back in the States. Speaking of which: back in the 1990s, when I was still living in my country of birth, I took a break from my usual backpacker holidays to foreign climes in order to ride the trains of the perpetually underfunded underdog Amtrak all the way from one side of the United States to the other. In marked contrast to most people who have dared such a journey, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Ditto the trip I once took from Vladivostok to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railroad (if and when Russia comes to its senses and stops being a geopolitical Doctor Evil, of course).

Just what is the appeal of trains? I could prattle on here about how they’re a far more environmentally friendly way to travel than planes or cars, but that’s not what causes them to tickle my romantic fancies. The range of feelings that trains evoke in me and in countless others is as rich as it is diverse. Small wonder that they’ve been such a staple of folk and pop music practically since George Stephenson’s Rocket first puffed down a track in 1829. The rock and roll of a train became the rhythm of twentieth-century music. A train can carry you away to a better life, or it can carry your baby away to a life without you. A train can be as life-affirming as a heartbeat or as mysterious as a nightmare.

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