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The construction of extensive railways, however, and particularly the consolidation of small, experimental lines into large systems, dates from the days of the discovery of gold in California.

There's a big link between trains and film. One of the first filmed objects was a train. The clickety-clack of the projector and the clickety-clack of the train are similar. There is the idea of the voyage - every voyage is a story. I wonder if film would have been invented without the train.

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.

Horses and mules, and even sail cars, made more rapid progress than did the earliest locomotive.

Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.

Projects can take years to exhibit proof-of-concept and a few more years to be converted into commercial realities.

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

I think a construction project for me is like writing a novel. I can't do the project unless I can envision sort of the whole structure and see what the end result might be.

Well, it's very dangerous to project, but it's clear that the existing technology has some more years to go.

In the early 1990s, when a lot of the developing world opened up to international capital flows... they ended up in very good long-term projects, but projects that weren't going to pay off for five or 10 or 20 years.