scarborough has played host to steam excursions for the last few years, beginning with the ‘flying scotsman’ in 2005, the ‘green arrow’ last year and this year a range of locos including an A4 pacific ‘union of south africa’. ok, so it may not be particularly cool to get excited about steam trains but c’mon - don’t you just find them irrepressibly romantic? not just that whole brief encounter thing, but the triumph of 20th century engineering, man and machine in harmony, the brute power, noise and smell, the luxury and whole hand-crafted feel of the carriages compared with today’s buses on rails.

and then there’s the speed battles indulged in by the big four train companies of the 1930s of which the A4 pacific is a result. the most famous A4 is the mallard (now housed in the national railway museum in york) which still holds the world record for the fastest steam train. it’s that big blue thing that looks nothing like a steam engine. the streamlined casing still appears, to my eyes at least, fantastically modern. perhaps because we supposedly now live in a postmodern culture where technology constantly breaks our expectations, the mallard will always look modern, it was one of the last points in our history where we thought we knew what the future looked like. it even sounds like the future.

we have these trains and their engineers - notably sir nigel gresley - to thank for the invention of the inter-city rail network as they slashed travel times up the east coast mainline. so please excuse my geekish enthusiasm and absence in the studio later this afternoon as i take my son to see the future steam out of scarborough station.

feeling geeky yourself? - more about the A4