Allow me to be a little on the controversial side… I am actually not sure how I can word this properly but here goes…
As you know I am a big fan of all things mechanical. If it makes noises and is powered by some sort of fuel then I am in. Of late I have been reading an excellent book (for the third time) which I had always avoided in the past. It is called Steam for Scrap and it gives a comprehensive, but not exhaustive, review of the demise of steam on British Railways (no don’t worry this isn’t all about trains, it’s a little deeper than that).
Now the reason I have only recently started to read this book is because the photos of these grand, powerful machines being cut up, thrown into wagons and resmelted has always made me very melancholy. The many yards around the country destroyed the best part of 16,000 once proud locomotives in a little over a decade. Thankfully a certain Mr Dai Woodham of Barry, South Wales, bought lots of them and then left them for years, untouched until the preservation movement got really going and the last loco left in 1990 (a 2-6-2 GWR prairie tank if I remember correctly).
So where does this become a little close to the bone. Well reading the captions for a lot of the photos that show movements of withdrawn and condemned engines heading towards the scrap yards hauled by another of their soon to be extinct sisters (seeing a line of Castle class GWR locos being almost sadly dragged by another of the same class for instance) reminded me of another book I own, Auschwitz by Laurence Rees.
“What the bloody hell.?” I hear you cry. Well when the trains (again) of victims arrived within the walls of Auschwitz-Birkenau they were often hearded into the execution chambers by other inmates, maybe from their own town or even their own family. Looking at the folorn images in both books (and people who don’t recognise an emotional attachment between a human and a machine would never perhaps understand this) then it is such a hard thing to understand how either could happen.
Obviously I am not suggesting the holocaust was anything but a terrible event, nor am I trying to lighten it’s effects, but I just am amazed at the similarities between two such different events.
So strange.