Can you cool it with the constant Rand references? If you want to bash me by association with some writers I do respect, please have a go at Hayek or von Mises. I’m far far more an Austrian-school guy than a LP/Objectivist nerd.
Point of extreme pedantry: the Isle of Man is not technically part of the UK. Like the Channel Islands, it is a Crown Dependency.
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Isn’t being overlooked that there are sentient trains that somehow still need drivers?
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Written by adults. Adults who had beliefs and opinions and politics. Adults whose beliefs, opinions and politics affected what they wrote, what they wrote about, how they staged, even how they voiced the books and shows. These people couldn’t help but have those things impact their work. And as such, what messages these works have in them, whether overtly or covertly (and for the latter, whether those messages were hidden on purpose or hidden even from the minds of the creators), are worthy of study.
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Are there any aspects of life which are not subjects for politically themed deconstruction??
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No. That doesn’t mean you have to pay attention to it if it bother you so much.
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Why men have nipples?
Eh, I’m not too worried. The ending is usually the least important part of a story for me (it’s all about the journey), doubly so for King novels. The closest he came to a satisfactory ending was probably 11/22/63, but even there he just had to insert extra magical elements. Oh well.
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Much fuss has been made about the ending, I don’t really get the negativity, I quite liked it.
Just to be sure I waited a few weeks before reading the last bit. Let it settle in before King puts his pants on 
And that right there is where we differ profoundly. It’s very important to me that “things which have political connotations” remain a subset of “things that are important in my life”.
For example, what bothers me about Thomas the Tank Engine is the way that various heritage railways feel compelled to periodically disguise perfectly good looking locos in the getup of the little blue twit. And that’s about it.
Steam engines also provided a hell of a lot more good paying, mostly unionized jobs than did their successors. Diesels are kind of the Foxconn of rail propulsion, except that even the starvation level jobs are gone.
The most logical explanation seems to be that the engineers are there because the trains are sentient.
You can’t run a decent authoritarian state with a bunch of unsupervised autonomous agents runnning around; and cultural and occupational norms surrounding the crewing of trains provide a perfect pretext to have potential undesirables continually surrounded by minders and informers.
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BTW: if you like series that function as one incredibly long convoluted novel…
Ever read Julian May’s Pliocene Saga / Galactic Milieu series?
Obligatory xkcd:
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I’ve been arguing about this with my wife for years! She thinks the show is just cute, but I always felt there was a creepy, fascist sensibility about it. Remember that the worse thing Sir Topum Hat say is, “You have caused confusion and delay!” As if interrupting the workflow is the worst sin a train could do.
It is cute too, but I certainly wouldn’t want to live there. God forbid I kicked back for a few minutes at work. I’d have Sir Topum Hat turning me into some 19th century industrial doodad.
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Ah, so that is why so few main lines have been electrified in the UK. I always attributed this to a certain reluctance to invest in infrastructure, but that makes a lot more sense. Thanks!
Where’s that why_not_both.gif when you need it?
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…Although since the electricity was mostly generated by coal, electrification would have used more coal than diesel trains.
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Indeed, and Old Norse is a case in point: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian (both) and modern Icelandic are all descendants of Old Norse. As Iceland was isolated for most of its history, the language there evolved much less than in other places, is still quite similar to Old Norse, and has retained complexity (e.g., four cases, three genders). In contrast, in places where there was more travel and exchange, Old Norse has lost in complexity, and so present-day Swedish, Danish or Norwegian do not have cases, and have at most two genders.
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Hmmm, it would be interesting to run the numbers on that (someone might have done this already).
I would rather say that the losses in generation and transportation of electricity do not outweigh the low efficiency of steam locomotives and the massive energy expenditure necessary to get the coal onto each locomotive.
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