"The Stockton to Darlington Express"

aviva_m took me to an interesting park at Priesterweg in Berlin the other week. Formerly industrial railway sidings, it was abandoned as a border area during the division of Berlin, and returned to nature. After the reunification of Germany, it was decided to keep it as a park, more-or-less as it was, complete with birch trees growing up between the railway lines, and so forth. (There's also walls in which you can legally graffitti, a cafe and some modern-art sculptures.)

In the middle of all this is sits a steam locomotive (probably dating in its siting there to post-reunification, as it's in good condition). I remarked to aviva_m, a propos of this, how I liked the piece of music "The Stockton to Darlington Express" by Alexander Faris, how it captured the speed and power and excitement of trains when they were new (the Stockton and Darlington Railway, opening 1825, was the world's first public train line), and added that I couldn't think of any other example of a new technology that had inspired a piece of music like this.^* There's no new music I can think of celebrating the invention of the car, or the television, the telephone.^†

* Though the music actually postdated the new technology by over a century...

† Though when I mentioned this to my boss Liz, she pointed out a counterexample, for the typewriter (which you should have a listen to—and indeed watch—if you don't already know it (or listen to The News Quiz, for which it is the theme tune).

aviva_m wasn't familiar with "The Stockton to Darlington Express", so I headed off to YouTube to play it to her... only to discover it wasn't there. Even googling it only came up with three hits, all to the LP I own a recording of it on. And when I mentioned it to my musical boss Liz, she had only vaguely heard of it; so it looks like it's not as well-known a piece of music as I had thought.

But as it's fun, and it's sweet, and it captures as I say the speed and power and excitement of steam locomotives when they were new, have a listen to an excerpt (with repeat marks edited out :o)) courtesy of yhn.