Today, we face time-warp on a railway train. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them. A Scottish couple joined my wife and me
in the dining car of the train from Toronto to Edmonton. He
turned out to be the retired head of maintenance for the
railways of Western Scotland. He was literally taking a Earlier
on the trip, I'd found Dionysius Lardner's book on steam engines
and locomotives in a dusty shop. Published in 1836, it told the
state of the art of railways only 16 years after Trevithick had
run the very first locomotive in London. So I showed my old book
to this Scottish engineer. He plunged into it. He turned a
knowing eye on the browning pages and told me which elements of
those embryonic engines were still to be found on modern
railways. He paused lovingly over one 160-year-old engine that
his staff had built in a modern Then he drew a recent newspaper
clipping from his wallet.