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Quotes About Railway

Everything bad comes from those resounding voices; those resounding voices started the war, and those resounding voices regulate the worst war of all, the war at railway stations. To hell with all resounding voices!
~ Heinrich Boll
I was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway.
~ Richard Flanagan
I am fond of lovely old words like 'locomotive'.
~ Tove Jansson
around the marshaling yards of the railway where I had embarked all those years ago, when this city had been raucous and sleazy, a frat boy's dream.
~ Paul Theroux
Herein, I think, is the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is being borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations
~ Paul Theroux
General Wavell feared that the policy of strict blockade of Jibuti favoured by Generals de Gaulle and Le Gentilhomme would merely stiffen its resistance. He proposed instead making an offer to admit sufficient supplies, such as milk for children, to prevent distress, to allow any troops wishing to join the Free French to do so and to evacuate the rest to some other French colony, and to negotiate for the use of the railway for supplying his own forces. But at home we took a different view.
~ Winston S. Churchill
The best way to see a country is from the footplate of a locomotive.
~ Unknown
If things just keep going along as smoothly as if we're on a railway track, reassured by the regularity and predictability of that clickety-clack, clickety clack, why would we bother with introspection about the meaning and purpose of it all, let alone the direction we're taking? p37
~ Hugh Mackay
Johnstone railway station was small, neat and tidy, quite attractive. On the platforms, I noticed that the signs also had the name in Gaelic – 'Baile Iain', literally 'John's town'. It is a recent wheeze by the triumphant, all-conquering Scottish National Party to add the Gaelic name to every station in the whole of Scotland, despite the fact that most of these places never had a Gaelic name or people who ever spoke Gaelic.
~ Unknown
I particularly approve of and welcome the arrest of millionaire saboteurs in the first and second-class railway carriage.
~ Vladimir Lenin
Regular railway services have been further suspended to further harass and increase the problem of ordinary population. Corona is a drama.
~ Unknown
The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.
~ Italo Calvino
Montreal, boasted its share of piles, built by the Scottish robber barons, of railway, booze and banking money. They were held together with hubris, a short-term binder at best since many of them had long ago been torn down or donated to McGill University, which needed another Victorian monstrosity like it needed the Ebola virus.
~ Louise Penny
Berry, supping the dregs of his tea. 'Well, not sitting here we won't. Tomorrow morning you and I will take the railway to Norwich. If I'm wrong, well, I'm wrong,' said Anders, swigging the awful tea back in one go.
~ John Bainbridge
Seated opposite me in the railway carriage, the elderly lady in the fox-fur shawl was recalling some of the murders that she had committed over the years.
~ John Boyne
There have been some management issues with Amtrak, but I think they have cleaned up their act.
~ Rodney Frelinghuysen
Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress.
~ Marcel Proust
because they were cousins, used to spend their time at parties in wandering through the rooms, each clutching her bag and followed by her daughter, hunting for one another like people at a railway station, and could never be at rest until they had reserved, by marking them with their fans or handkerchiefs, two adjacent chairs;
~ Marcel Proust
They were in no way connected now with nature, with the world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional framework, just as the action of a novel is framed in the railway carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it to pass the time.
~ Marcel Proust
How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?
~ Martin Amis
To maximize the effectiveness of any excavator, it had to be serviced efficiently by spoil removal trains. Thus, for Stevens, the railway, the Panama Railroad, was the key to success on the Isthmus, something never fully appreciated by the French.
~ Unknown
On both counts, that meant a confrontation with the United Fruit Company, an American firm based in Boston. Known to Central Americans as el pulpo (the octopus) because of its all-encompassing tentacles, in 1899 United Fruit had obtained a 99-year concession over a vast tract of jungle from Guatemala's then dictator – and with it, the right to finish and operate a railway to the Caribbean coast.
~ Unknown
The entire city was his hunting ground. In the summer months, dressed in a blazer and wearing his straw hat at a jaunty angle, he would regularly stroll along under the arches, and then along the pier. Next he would ride on the Volks Railway, where in the cramped intimacy of its hard seats he liked to talk to strangers, telling them this was the world's oldest still-running electric train, and boring them with facts about it.
~ Peter James