The virtues of engineering

Standing on a railway platform and a high-speed express train comes through. 250 tons of steel hurtles along at 125 mph, safely and predictably. And I’m thinking: this is the kind of unimaginable feat that good engineering makes possible. But when my friend Tim Minshall was thinking about this the only mention of “engineering” he could find in connection with railways were notices of travel delays “due to engineering work”. The result: an entire country which associates engineering only with trouble.