Communication

If I'm to put theory into practice, I can't help but think that I should be saying something other than "This is a nice piece of railway", but what will this message be? Over the last week or so it's dawned on me that one of the attractions of all railways is the juxtaposition of order and chaos. There's the routine of the timetable, the regimentation of the livery, the need for compatible stock with common coupling and brake systems, the grouping of like items into classes and perhaps above all the consistently parallel lines that give order even when nothing else is present. Of course the railways can exhibit their own anomalies but that only serves to enhance the order of the rest. In greatest contrast is the randomness of the human interaction; passengers turn up at differing times, goods traffic ebbs and flows to meet human demand and all other vehicles in human command don't follow the same rigidly proscribed paths. Therefore I think I'd like to say something of this.

This will shape quite literally the design, but more of this later.