Paintings of trains

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These images, and those after the jump, are paintings of trains, train yards and train stations. They primarily feature steam locomotives. In their day they were astonishing pieces of technology. We forget that for most of human history you had to walk, or at best ride a horse, to travel anywhere overland. The took a long time and trains were the first vehicles that greatly shrunk the time between two points. 

Today if we talk about trains at all it is the fetishists of high-speed rail. High-speed rail is used to move people, but in the U.S. we use our rail network to move freight, and so there is little real interest in high-speed trains.