Affinity to the Big Four

Absolutely - Auden's prose is brilliant:
[h=1]Night Mail[/h] This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

 

By comparison, it is worth noting that no-one has thought to write down the prose of the EE. At least not that I can find!

 

Found this interesting snippet on the BTF website.
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[TD][FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular] There was a proposal to continue the non-stop with Deltics but the LDC's were unhappy at having to ride in the rear cab for half the journey and having to changeover by walking through the engine compartment whlst the loco was running.[/FONT]


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I'm a BR(E) man rather than LNER. I love the lines of LNER and GER locos because that's what there was when I was small enough to be impressed by them. Britannias as well, even though they could have been better if they had more LNER ideas in them . But I prefer BR green to LNER - to me seeing locos I only ever saw in BR green in Apple Green just looks odd.

Its a jokey thing with me really, and I like any steam. There are very few really ugly steam locos anyway, certainly in the UK. I'm one of the few people who actually likes the look of the Thompson Pacifics (except Great Northern - that cab!). The only loco I've fired is an Austerity tank, and I currently volunteer on the narrow gauge, so I'm not really fussed.