Apprentice model of locomotive 202, ‘Le chocolat’

Before the advent of the railways, Europeans had travelled overland in much the same way for centuries: by the power of foot and of horse. To move away from the place of your birth involved journeys which were slow, arduous and often dangerous. In 1800, a journey overland between Paris and St. Petersburg might have taken more than 20 days. By 1900, after the arrival of the railways, that same journey could have been completed in around 30 hours. All across Europe, journey times were cut, new routes were built, with telegraph lines running alongside them. Time-zones were standardised internationally and mass tourism was born. All thanks to the railways. Rail travel was transformative, and for the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, trains in the modern era seemed almost to possess magical qualities. ‘We feel ourselves as powerful as the sorcerers of old’, he wrote in 1847. ‘We put our magic horse to the carriage and space disappears; we fly like clouds in a storm ... we are as potent in the present age as those in the middle ages thought only the devil to be.’ This object is an apprentice model of a high-speed railway locomotive, the 220. It was nicknamed ‘le chocolat’ because of its brown colour and ran on the lines of the Compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord in France, referred to as the Nord, from 1898 until the 1930s. A highly detailed maquette like this would have taken over 10,000 hours to complete and is an elegant testimony to a transformative era in Europe.