Perspectives | On Trains and Railways

By Rimbaud, Greene, Wilde and Others

The train is one of modern civilization’s most compelling symbols: industrial yet intimate, linear yet unpredictable; noisy, grimy, romantic, efficient; bound to ideas of escape, momentum, transition, isolation, the ache of departure, and the thrill of arrival.

For over a century, trains have thundered through the pages of literature and the canvases of …