Who Built the Railway?
Everyone knows the name Isambard Kingdom Brunel;
And everyone knows that sepia photograph:
The top hat, the waistcoat, the cigar,
And the giant chain-link in the background –
The busy preoccupied self-assured pride
Of the foremost Victorian engineer:
The man of the moment:
Proud of his steam-ship leviathans,
Equally proud of his Great Western Railway –
The dignified certainty of genius –
Knowing that his 120 miles of long line
Would run all the way from Paddington,
And London time to Bristol Temple Meads
With a mean gradient of just 1 in 1,380,
Just as his drawing board intended.
But where are the names of those who built it?
Where are the names of the women
Who cooked and cared in the camps along the way?
Where are their Fox Talbot portraits?
Where the memorials to those
Whose picks and shovels and slide rule discipline
And one hundred deaths,
Carried the line through Box Tunnel?
Where the tribute to their collective anonymity?
(Box Tunnel is where Wilbert Awdry, as a boy, imagined conversations between engines as they laboured through the night time darkness.)
“There was no doubt in my mind that steam engines all had definite personalities … little imagination was needed to hear in the puffings and pantings of the two engines the conversation they were having …”