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“Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this. [On British railway dining cars]”

Quote by Simon Bradley

Work

The Railways: Nation, Network and People

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Simon Bradley

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“That’s why all of those records from high school sound so good. It’s. It that the songs were better- it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now. Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something- survived it, experienced it- is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living though something. Though hard to grasp, nostalgia is elating to bask in- temporarily restoring color to the past. It creates a sense memory that momentarily simulates context. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; it doesn’t require the difficult task of negotiation, the heartache and uncertainty that the present does.”

“It was a cultural revolution, and was not directed at instituting economic changes. He could thus appeal to old prejudices without threatening the existing economic system. This appealed, above all, to white-collar workers and the small entrepreneurs, as some of the statistics presented in this book will demonstrate. It was their kind of revolution: the ideology would give them a new status, free them from isolation in the industrial society, and give them a purpose in life. But it would not threaten any of their vested interests; indeed it would reinforce their bourgeois predilections toward family...and restore the 'good old values' which had been so sadly dismantled by modernity.”

“অসংখ্য ঘটনা ঘটে একজন মানুষের জীবনে। আমিও তার ব্যতিক্রম নই। মাঝে মাঝে অলস দুপুরে বিছানায় শুনে আকাশের দিকে তাকিয়ে, কিংবা গভীর রাতে লিখতে বসে যখন কারেন্ট চলে যায় জানালার বাইরে তাকিয়ে ভাবতে থাকি আমার সেই শৈশব, সেই কৈশোরের সোনালী দিনগুলোর কথা। ছবির মত মনের পর্দায় খেলে উঠতে থাকে কত কথা, কত স্মৃতি। কোনটা হাসির কোনটা বেদনার। কখনো উদার হয়ে যায় মন, কখনো হাহাকার করে উঠে। বারবার মনে হয় এইতো সেদিনের কথা, হাত বাড়ালেই যেন ছোঁয়া যায়, কিন্তু তা আর যায় না! মনে হয় একটিবার, শুধু একটিবারের জন্য যদি সে সব দিনে ফিরে যেতে পারতাম!”