All Gone To Look For America (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
And it says something for the romance and nostalgia which the railroads still evoke that it draws 600,000 visitors a year. But just walking through the door it is easy to see why. Standing in front of you – on a par with any reconstructed dinosaur (even Leonardo) – are some of the world’s great locomotives, beautifully restored and most of them available to be explored and in some cases even climbed over. For a start – almost literally – there is the magnificent Gov. Stanford, a great black brute of an engine with a funnel like a popcorn machine, a cow-catcher that could carve its way through a corrida and a vast, front-mounted lantern the size of a World War II searchlight. It is, even to modern eyes, a stupendous thing: somehow antique, futuristic, impressive and ridiculous all at once. In an electronic age of ever-diminishing moving parts, it is outrageously – almost frighteningly – mechanical. When we want to praise something we say it has ‘all the bells and whistles’; take one look at a train like this and you see why.
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