When is a Mallard not a Duck?

Today saw a trip to one of my favourite local attractions, the National Railway Museum in York, with the added bonus of entertaining our two granddaughters. The museum does precisely what it says on the tin, it tells the history of the railways in the UK from the Stockton & Darlington to the present day. It also explains how railways works and has special exhibitions on various subjects of interest.

I love the fact that it contains the really big exhibits, engines and carriages, together with small-scale ephemera such as the silver service presented to a former chief engineer of The Great Western Railway. Indeed my favourite exhibit is quite small scale. It is a model constructed in 1905 to train signalmen. Amazingly it was still being used in 1995. The exhibit still works and every month a live demonstration is given by volunteers.

The museum caused me to reflect on the transient nature of technology. It could be said that the steam age lasted from the success of the Rocket in 1829 to the Mallard travelling at 126 mph in 1938, a record that has never been broken. This steam age was one where Britain led the world; it developed ground breaking technologies and exported those technologies throughout the world. Now of course this technology is totally obsolete, and only represented in museums, and Britain imports most of its railway hardware from Europe or Japan. We can see parallels in the motor age; this was dominated by the US based be moths of Ford, GM, and Chrysler, however new entrants from the Japan and the Far East have now superseded these.

So when we look at the domination of companies like Google and Amazon, and the technologies that they use, pause for thought their time of domination is likely to be shorter than the steam age, and just as the steam engine looked unassailable in 1900, so the search engine is equally vunerable in 2015. (Apologies for that laboured metaphor).

Any way all experienced a thoroughly enjoyable day, and at the end my eldest granddaughter had remembered the significance of the Mallard, despite her Dad telling her it was a duck!