I'm pretty sure the writer's knowledge didn't extend to single-line token operation!
Apart from anything else it felt anachronistic to me because my instinct was that people at that era had a lot more respect for the business of railways and the people operating them... but that may just be the sort of fiction that I've read. ("The Railway Children" comes to mind as at least one example written by a female author, although of course that's a generation or more earlier.) Signal-boxes were places full of mystique, and you didn't ever distract the signalman. The stationmaster might be a pompous figure of fun, as might the local mayor, but like the mayor he was an important authority figure. And the train was the one link with the wider world outside: it brought in the newspapers, it took out the milk-churns, you set your watch by its passing ("railway time"!), and all those who set off to greater things elsewhere would start off by buying a ticket.
So if you didn't really understand how it worked, I'd expect an attitude of mystified respect (as for the inward functioning of a jet-liner) rather than a casual dismissal of 'boys' toys'...
As a writer, the problem is always that you don't know what you don't know (and that, however esoteric, your readership may contain someone who does!) I've no idea how accurate the section at the start of the book on Wrens overhauling boats' engines was -- it sounded credible enough to me, going solely by my memories of Nevil Shute's haunting "Requiem for a Wren" -- but my suspicion is that the author had researched that, because she knew it was outside her experience, but assumed she didn't have to worry about the trains...
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2018-04-25 12:29 am (UTC)Apart from anything else it felt anachronistic to me because my instinct was that people at that era had a lot more respect for the business of railways and the people operating them... but that may just be the sort of fiction that I've read. ("The Railway Children" comes to mind as at least one example written by a female author, although of course that's a generation or more earlier.)
Signal-boxes were places full of mystique, and you didn't ever distract the signalman. The stationmaster might be a pompous figure of fun, as might the local mayor, but like the mayor he was an important authority figure. And the train was the one link with the wider world outside: it brought in the newspapers, it took out the milk-churns, you set your watch by its passing ("railway time"!), and all those who set off to greater things elsewhere would start off by buying a ticket.
So if you didn't really understand how it worked, I'd expect an attitude of mystified respect (as for the inward functioning of a jet-liner) rather than a casual dismissal of 'boys' toys'...
As a writer, the problem is always that you don't know what you don't know (and that, however esoteric, your readership may contain someone who does!) I've no idea how accurate the section at the start of the book on Wrens overhauling boats' engines was -- it sounded credible enough to me, going solely by my memories of Nevil Shute's haunting "Requiem for a Wren" -- but my suspicion is that the author had researched that, because she knew it was outside her experience, but assumed she didn't have to worry about the trains...