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Such film festivals – those extraordinary clusters of images, transports of light, of virtual worlds scattered across a real geography – pale in scale when considered next to the project of the www   Gareth Evans, Jurist at the International Short Film Festival at Oberhausen, 2001       The first postal train ran between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830 Thomas De Quincey’s ‘On the English Mail-coach, or the Glory of Motion’ (1849) describes the new technology as little more than glorified catering equipment:   Tidings, fitted to convulse all nations, must henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking, when heard screaming on the wind, and advancing through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way to the pot-wallopings of the boiler   The essay, in the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine, nostalgically associates the mail-coach with glamour, danger, and the news of Waterloo ending Napoleon’s European domination as the sword-arm of the French Revolution From the other side of the industrial revolution, and the opposite end of the political spectrum, China Miéville likes trains, and makes them the narrative drive of his recently published October: The Story of the Russian Revolution They hurtle Lenin and the Romanovs inexorably across the vast spaces of Eurasia in 1917, and make the transfer of ideas and information more tangible than the early telegraph equipment with which they coexisted As the civil war spread in 1918, locomotives pulled propaganda cars with the equipment to make and project film across the continent One passenger in a Red train, pioneering film theorist and director Dziga Vertov, reported that peasant audiences unused to ‘the taste of film-moonshine’ didn’t respond to Hollywood-style linear narrative, but they did perk up and stare at the screen when people like them appeared on it     ‘The movie camera was invented in order to penetrate deeper into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena,’ Vertov wrote in ‘Provisional Instructions to Cinema-Eye Groups’ Because