Author Biography
Rodney Jory spent his working career as a physicist in Australia. His first contact with trains was when he was constrained to ride to high school each day behind a black and sooty steam loco. It was not the physics, engineering or efficiency of the engine, but the efficiency of the operation, which exercised his mind. After completing his graduate degree in Canberra he took a post at Florida State University where there are no trains but an appreciation of the way other parts of the universe work. His next post was in Liverpool, UK, where there are loads of trains of all shapes and sizes, before returning to his longstanding appointment in Canberra. As part of his duties in his later working years he accompanied groups of students to conferences in various locations around the world, often in Europe. He was also for 11 years the leader of the Australian team to the International Physics Olympiad, which took him annually to locations as diverse as Havana and Beijing. By now he had travel, and in particular European train systems, in his blood.
