Steam trains are racist

Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum has set a terrible example for trains everywhere by exhibiting a replica of the world’s first steam train locomotive.

Invented in 1804 by Richard Trevithick, it marked the beginning of an international transition from sea to land travel. The slave trade ended in the UK in 1807, and by the time railways expanded throughout the British Empire in the 1850s, had been abolished in for 40 years.

But trains and indeed steam itself continued to be used in the wider international slave trade and aided colonial expansion.

In turn, the entire exhibit, that explores the crucial role of railways in national and international development, is in fact paying homage to slavery.

Trains now have no place in our modern society as their entire influence on industrial development and technological advancement can now be tied back to the slave trade and colonisation. We must abolish it all as we did slavery.

In order to fully and sufficiently decolonise our modern society, the link between trains and slavery cannot be ignored. So we must entirely ignore conversations around the realities of global history because that is the only way we can understand what has brought us to this point of change and continue to make those changes for the future – by erasing history entirely.

And trains.