This picture of a steam loco, on the ceinture line in Paris, reminds us that steam trains in cities produce lots of mess – soot and steam especially. Not surprisingly, most of the areas around the railways tracks were either industrial brown-field or slums…Mornington Crescent, outside Euston in London was so bad that, at the end of the 19C and beginning of the 20C, artists and poets could afford to live there.