Time & Twizell 

There are many parallels between the steam age railway and the World Wide Web, both grew from technology bubbles, both created quantum leaps in the speed of communication over vast distances, almost, but not quite, as far as we can daydream. These steam age blogs are the result of the meeting between my steam age youth and the cyber century of today. However, I should also mention that, yesterday is as unreachable as Alpha Centauri and tomorrow is even further away. We forget more than we remember and we imagine the rest, we make up little tales and stories and imagine, and imagine. This isn’t ‘how it was’ its how it is, at that moment, right then, that very instant. ‘On this day in ….’ what does this mean exactly? When you begin to dig into the past, the bigger the explanation becomes and the further away the original question is.

Each daydreaming train of thought is of its day, sunny day photos and gloomy ones too, men, machines, changing times and changing trains. Random trains of thought randomly selected and randomly ordered. Written for the pleasure of having nothing more to do, at that moment, than daydreaming on an ocean of time, no more than a grain of sand, a mote, trapped in a shaft of light, at the very edge of nowhere. 

Engines, like Twizell here, were built on Tyneside and shipped to countries far and wide, around the Globe. In Victoria’s Britain locomotive and railway engineering, were the cutting edge, growth industries, the Apple and Microsoft of the ‘industrial’ age. Tyneside wasn’t the only place building steam locomotives, Glasgow, Leeds, Kilmarnock, Manchester, and Newton-le-Willows, where the Vulcan Foundry had its own station, Vulcan Halt, were all involved in the steam engine manufacturing and exporting business.

Tyneside and Glasgow also built the ships that carried the steam locomotives around the world and, on Tyneside, they dug up the coal, which made the steam that sailed the ships that turned the wheels, and drove the whole thing along. (I know they mined coal in other places too.) All that heavy metal had to be made, the ores it was made from mined, smelted, forged, rolled into rails, deck plates, boiler plates, riveted, bolted, and screwed, I’m exhausted just thinking about all that work, all those 10s of thousands of jobs, no millions of jobs. For all practical purposes, the vast majority of those jobs no longer exist – this bit of Made in Britain is now the heritage industry.

Beamish, where Twizell once served her original purpose, as a colliery railway locomotive, is now a visit to ‘the time that was’. The past, no matter how bleak it might have been for those folk who lived in it is, somehow, comforting, a safe haven in a world of uncertain futures, of constant change, of fleeting images, flickering behind a screen, not made in Britain.