Long train journeys are much enjoyed by me,
Just as a tourist but not excluding
A nifty way to get from A to B.
Though I can’t leave this without alluding
To
My obsession with steam locomotives
On which I worked a very long time ago.
Hard to know from where my passion derives:
This work was hot and dirty and although
It’s
Quite true, positions me in space and time
When steam travel then was seen as the norm.
But there’s also history down the line
When a clean pastoral landscape was just torn
By
Smoke and filth, whole countryside pollution:
Didn’t help the farmer’s wife’s neuralgia,
Neither the farmers own indigestion;
Nor also his chronic nasal alergia.
Though what they called them then I’ve no idea.