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LE KAP
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WINTER 2015
It’s better to travel ... Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving train, ship, car or plane. BY RICHARD WEBB
I owe a lot to Alain de Botton. His book, the Art of Travel, is not just a thought-provoking book; it also forms the inspiration to write this story. In this book he says, ‘there is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads; large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape’. ‘At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are,’ he wrote. The pleasure we derive from a journey is often more dependent on the mindset we travel with, than on our destination. So, if mobility were a precursor to inspiration, what would be my most beautiful ‘yesteryear’ way to travel? De Botton again: ‘What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to
possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.’ Nostalgia, romance and the glamour associated with rail travel get my heart going ‘clickety-clack’. The Flying Scotsman, named after the rail service running between King’s Cross station in London and Edinburgh in Scotland and operated by North Eastern Railway, is surely the most memorable train journey ever. From the 1920s the train was considered to be the height of luxury, with first-class restaurant facilities, a cocktail bar and radio equipment, so passengers could listen to the BBC. In 1928, it was re-worked to enable a new crew to take over without stopping the train, allowing it to haul the first ever non-stop London to Edinburgh service, reducing the journey time to eight hours. It also became the first locomotive to clock a top speed of 160 km/h. In 1928, the train broke the record for the longest regular non-stop train journey in the world, when it ran an express service for the entire 393-mile route. This 3-cylinder locomotive carried 8 tons of coal, 19 000 litres of water and had racked up 4 million kilometres. But in 1958, in a historic move, which would signal the decline of steam, The Flying Scotsman was hauled by a diesel locomotive for the first time.