I Have Always Liked Trains

    I have always liked trains. The old ones were the best, of course, their soot-black engines venting bursts of steam and chuffing links of stylised white smoke, and the carriages rattling and yawing and the wheels violently clanging—so much might and effort, yet producing such a gay and toy-like effect. And then the way the landscape seemed to rotate like a vast, slow wheel, or to keep opening like a fan, and the telegraph wires dipped and slid, and birds flew past the window backwards, slowly, effortfully, like so many discarded bits of black rag.

John Banville, Ancient Light (London: Viking, 2012), p. 187.