So I'm sipping some rye and playing one of them new-fangled vidja games, just thinking about trains and how they sort of evolved.
The first locomotive: boiler on a set of wheels with one piston. Crept forward.
Early 19th century: small, able to pull a little bit, good replacement for wagon trains in power. Small boiler, a couple driver wheels, maybe some pilot wheels. Whistle that goes "tweet tweet". A noble beast.
Mid 19th century: able to pull a couple dozen cars with a speed and force unrivaled at that time. We start to see 2-6-0 and 2-6-2 configurations with larger boilers and coal tenders. Whistle screams, sounds excellent on a mountain pass with the echo. A steel thoroughbred.
Late 19th century: Locomotives the size of large buildings. Able to pull several dozen cars. Large boilers with advanced superheaters. Tenders the size of houses. 4-8-4s and 4-10-4s start to come out, making a metric fuckload of power. Whistles now sound like a god yelling. Like no other thing of beauty.
Early 20th century: we've bred them even farther. Able to pull trains miles long through mountains, able to get up to 80mph on flat ground and produce hundreds of thousands of foot-pounds of torque from its drivers. We start to see articulated duplex drivers, giving us things like 4-6-6-4 and 6-8-8-6. Tenders are as long as locomotives now. Starting to move from burning coal to burning heavy fuel oil. Whistle is deafening and low, you can feel it in your chest.
Mid-20th century: scaled down a bit on size with newer technology. Diesel locomotives have come into play. Instead of two or four large steam chests for slow-moving pistons, each has 12-20 pistons in large diesel engine weldments. Now powered by traction motors. All steam locomotives now burn oil. And have steam horns in some weird bastardization. It's unnatural. Whistle or do nothing. It feels artificial.
Late 20th century: it's all diesel. The only steam locomotives are excursion trains and mom-and-pop farm freight railroads. Everything has hard lines and angles. It's all horns. There are no whistles. Locomotives no longer have their own voices. We weep, for we stand in the shadows of giants that we have forsaken.
Early 21st century: locomotives are smooth and sleek. No hard lines. Tube-shaped to go faster. Can't pull much, but it can go fuckin fast. Looks like it has the face of an old-testament angel.
And yes, my former therapist and every single one of my teachers says I'm more likely than not on the spectrum.
