Railways can exert an extraordinary influence upon the psyche, whether one is an onlooker, as in Mr Welsh’s masterpiece, or whether one is speeding to a pre-determined destination. They can liberate thought or, most notably in the United States of America, they can be engines of transformation, with a quasi-colonial purpose. Think of the Transcontinental Railroad which straddled the emerging USA in the 19th century. Starting, separately, in Sacramento, California, and Omaha, Nebraska, the two lines eventually merged at Promontory, Utah, in a symbolic act of union. Now, it would be decidedly pushing things somewhat to suggest that such elevated concepts were in the collective mind of the London North Eastern Railway (LNER) when they breezily declared that their trains would continue to observe English law even when they had crossed the border into Scotland.