It wasn't just steam engine noise, it was the SMELL.

I still remember, and it's 45 years if it's a day - one of those Virginia Woolf "moments of being" I guess - standing on a bridge as a pair of loco's accelerating at top whack went under and engulfed me and my mates in a sulphurous fog as they thundered below.

I can smell it now....

"Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky