Steamy Memories

Sometime last year, when I was flying with Lufthansa, I came across an article about restored Junkers in Lufthansa's in-flight magazine. Junkers JU 52 were pre-WW-II era aircraft that were used for both civilian and military services. Lufthansa had lovingly restored one of the planes and was even flying them on a special route from Berlin Tempelhof to give its passengers a whiff of the bygone era. Nice.

Now, I am not a big fan of all things old but there are still a few things that make me say, "In the good ol' times we had...." One of them of being the Steam Engines that powered our railways till the electric and diesel versions took over. I can never get over this steam engine fascination of mine. While all the kids (at least I think most of them) in the class were dreaming about becoming pilots, I used to be firmly grounded driving (if you can call it that) trains over a pair of parallel rails. In reality, I was lucky enough to be around these Steam Engines during my holidays. I always liked the way the grimy bandannaed engineers handled these machines and I wanted to badly belong to that elite club. I knew then that I would one day be a Steam Engine driver/engineer (depends on the continent you are on).

All this might sound like a juvenile English assignment (with a very corny title) but I can't express it any other way. Steam Engines were cool. Period. An engineer's ultimate driving machine if you can call it that. To use a clichéd phrase, you needed to get up close and personal with one to believe them. The long black imposing machines spewing steam looked like a beast that'd just come to life and is ready to devour anything in its way. The huge wheels interconnected by coupling rods that moved in tandem, smokestack belting out black smoke and soot and the faraway look of the headlight that gave a feeling that the engine was already planning out its trip to the destination. While all this was happening, in case any dumb soul even managed to venture near its path, the engine's mighty signature high-pitched whistle was a sure warning of the things to come. A display of unadulterated raw power.

As an engineer (or engine driver), you had to stick out your neck out (literally and idiomatically) to peer over the long boiler to see what lay in the engine's path when it moved. The glassless windows meant for viewing were as good as useless. The only view one had through these windows were that of the boiler. The heat inside the engineer's cabin due to the boiler's furnace would be unbearable and one had to work like a slave to keep the engine moving. The driver and his assistant had to constantly haul coal from its coal truck and shovel it into the boiler furnace, so that the steam pressure was maintained just right. One had to use a regulator to control the speed (which depended on the train, the bogies and the distance to be covered). No computer readouts telling you the speed or the steam pressure. No auto pilots. You had to depend on just plain pressure gauges, the sounds - read that as puffing, wheezing, drumming - the engine made and then use your years of experience to interpret these sounds correctly to ensure that the passengers or goods reached the destination safely and on time. No cozy air-conditioned cabins, no joystick type levers, no satellite or two-way radios, no silent whirring of the turbines and definitely no cushioned seats to relax on. A true labor of love. And if you felt (yes, felt) that you were losing traction you had to drop sand through sand pipes every now and then on the tracks to prevent wheelspin. It was a constant rigour of backbreaking work coupled with alertness. But extremely satisfying at the end of the day. A real job for a real man.

I still feel sad that you don't get to see them anymore. Steam Engines have become relics of a bygone era. By the time I was of a legal driving age, the steam engines had run out of steam. For me, it was an end of a career I had dreamed of even before it started. All that massive hardware becoming obsolete and extinct in a way depicts the extinction of the industrial era's dinosaur. But while the steam engines interconnected places and changed our economy, they were commanding beasts indeed. At the cost of repeating myself, one of the few things that make me say, "In the good ol' times we had...."

But all is not lost. Microsoft's Train Simulator (though a poor substitute to the real thing), Railroad Tycoon 3, Sid Meier's Railroads have helped me sustain my fascination, at least virtually. The Murder on the Orient Express and The Flying Scotsman in MTS are real fun episodes and I never get tired of "driving" these special trains. And while these are cool, cooler still is the series "Thomas (the Tank Train) and Friends." I enjoy it as much as the kid next door does. I am sure the producers of the show love steam engines as much as I do. May their tribe increase.