text:
Rail transport in India

Rail transport in India consists of primarily of passenger and freight shipments along an integrated rail network. Indian Railways (IR), a statutory body under the ownership of the Ministry of Railways of the Government of India, operates India's national railway system. It is the primary owner and operator of rail operations throughout the country including suburban rail in major metros.

Majority of the metro urban rail networks are operated by independent bodies constituted for the purpose of the respective operations. Private owned rails exist in few places, mostly used to connect freight to the integrated rail network. Inter-city rail services are operated primarily by Indian Railways though efforts have been made to introduce privately operated trains as recently as 2022.

The national rail network comprised total route length of 68907 km, with more than 129000 km of track and 8,000+ stations and is the fourth-largest in the world. It is one of the busiest networks in the world, transporting more than 11 billion passengers and 1.416 billion tonnes of freight annually. As of April 2024, more than 63,456 km of all the routes have been electrified with 25 KV AC electric traction. The rolling stock consisted of 318,196 freight wagons, 84,863 passenger coaches, 14,781 locomotives and other multiple units owned by Indian Railways apart from rail-sets operated by metro rail corporations.

Studies by economic historians have identified substantially beneficial economic effects from the Indian railway network.

1832–1852: Industrial railways
In 1832, the proposal to construct the first railway line in India at Madras was made. In 1835, a railway track was constructed between Red Hills and Chintadripet in Madras and became operational in 1837. It was hauled by a rotary steam engine imported from England and was used for ferrying granite.

The Madras Railway was established in 1845. Temporary railway lines were built such as the Godavari Dam Construction Railway at Dowleswaram by Arthur Cotton to supply stone for the construction of a dam over the Godavari River in 1845 and the Solani aqueduct railway, built by Proby Cautley in Roorkee to transport construction materials for an aqueduct over the Solani river in 1851. On 1 August 1849, the Great Indian Peninsular Railway was incorporated with a guarantee system providing free land and guaranteeing five-percent rates of return to private English companies building railways. In 1852, a steam locomotive imported from England was tried at Byculla.

1853–1924: Passenger railways and expansion

In 1853, the first passenger train on broad gauge ran for 34 km between Bombay and Thane which had 14-carriages carrying 400 people, hauled by three steam locomotives: the Sahib, Sindh and Sultan. The Great Southern of India Railway Company was established with its headquarters in England in 1853. The Thane viaducts, the first railway bridges, were built over the Thane creek when the Mumbai-Thane line was extended to Kalyan in May 1854. Eastern India's first passenger train ran 24 mi from Howrah, near Kolkata, to Hoogly on 15 August 1854. The construction of 60 mi line in the South between Royapuram in Madras and Arcot started in 1853, which became operational on 1 July 1856. The first workshops were established by GIPR at Byculla in 1854 and Madras Railway at Perambur in 1856. The Bombay, Baroda, and Central India Railway (BB&CI) was incorporated in 1855 and Eastern Bengal Railway in 1858. The Carnatic Railway was founded in 1869. On 24 February 1873, a horse-drawn 3.8 km tram opened in Calcutta between Sealdah and Armenian Ghat street. On 9 May 1874, a horse-drawn tramway began operation in Bombay between Colaba and Parel. The Great Southern of India Railway and the Carnatic Railway merged in 1874 to form the South Indian Railway. In 1879, the Nizam's Guaranteed State Railway was established which built railway lines across the then Hyderabad State. In 1877, an Ajmer built F-1/734 Steam Locomotive became the first indigenously built locomotive in India. East Coast State Railway was established in 1890. In 1897, lighting in passenger coaches was introduced with Jodhpur Railway, the first to introduce electric lighting as standard fixtures. In 1908, Madras Railway merged with Southern Mahratta Railway to form the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway. Pamban bridge, the first sea bridge was opened on 24 February 1914. In 1920, electric lighting of signals was introduced between Dadar and Currey Road in Bombay.

1925–1946: Electrification and further expansion
The first railway budget was presented in 1924. The Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway was merged with the East Indian Railway Company (EIR) in the same year. On 3 February 1925, the first electric train ran between Victoria Terminus (VT) and Kurla, hauled by a SLM electric locomotive on 1500 V DC traction. Later, the VT–Bandra section was electrified and the first Electric Multiple Units (EMU) were introduced in with 1.5KV DC units imported were from Cammell Laird and Uerdingenwagonfabrik. On 1 April 1929, Grand Trunk Express commenced operations between Peshawar in the North Western Railway and Mangalore with two coaches detached and connected to Madras further. The Frontier Mail made its inaugural run between Bombay and Peshawar in 1928. Technical advancements led to automatic colour light signals become operational between Bombay and Byculla in 1928. In the subsequent years, the route from Bombay to Poona was electrified and in June 1930, the first deluxe train, Deccan Queen began running, hauled by a WCP-1 locomotives with seven coaches along the route. The Grand Trunk express commenced operating as a dedicated daily train between Madras and Delhi from 1 September 1930. Chennai suburban railway started operating in 1931 with a single metre gauge line from Chennai Beach to Tambaram. In 1944, all the railway companies were taken over by the Government.

Indian Railway Classification
Beginning 1926 and for statistical purposes, the Government of British Raj classified Indian railway systems according to three classes. It was a similar system to the Railroad classes in North America. Trams, industrial and port railways were recorded separately and independently of turnover. In terms of net revenue, East Indian Railway was the largest company in 1927 with 86,881,000 rupees. Followed by the North Western State Railway with 57,343,000 rupees and the Great Indian Peninsula Railway with 56,215,000 rupees. No further reclassification was carried out after 1942, but the rankings remained in use until the mid-1950s.

1947–1983: Zonal re-organisation and further developments
The first locomotive manufacturing unit at Chittaranjan was commissioned in 1950. In December 1950, the Central Advisory Committee for Railways approved the plan for re-organising Indian Railways into six regional zones with the Southern (14 April 1951), Central (5 November 1951), and Western (5 November 1951) zones being the first to be created. On 14 April 1952, the Northern Railway, the Eastern Railway and the North Eastern Railway were created. In 1952, fans and lights were mandated for all compartments in passenger trains and sleeping accommodations were introduced in coaches. In 1953, the Indian Railways completed hundred years of operation which was commemorated by multiple events and a commemorative postage stamp. The first diesel locomotive used in India was fabricated by North British Locomotive Company in 1954. On 1 August 1955 the South-Eastern Railway was split from the Eastern Railway, and, the following year, divisional systems of administration were set up for the various regional zones. The first rail coaches were manufactured in India from 1956 when the Integral Coach Factory was established at Madras. In 1956, the first air-conditioned train plied between Howrah and New Delhi. In 1958, the North-Eastern Railway split to form a new Northeast Frontier Railway.

In 1957, Indian Railways adopted 25 kV AC traction with the first trial runs operating with the WAM-1 locomotives in 1959 and commercial services beginning in August 1960. In 1960, the Railway Board of India commissioned a study to increase the speed of passenger trains to 160 kph with an intermediate stage of 120 kph. Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) started work on the same in 1962 with field trials commencing in 1967 with coaches manufactured by the Integral Coach Factory at Madras and hauled by diesel locomotives. The first containerized freight rail transport began between Bombay and Ahmedabad in 1966. In 1966, electrification of several suburban tracks around Delhi, Madras and Calcutta were completed with the 25 kV AC system. In 1969, the Government of India announced the introduction of a new express train capable of reaching speeds of up to 120 kph in the railway budget and the first Rajdhani Express was flagged off from New Delhi to Howrah in March 1969. In 1974, Indian Railways endured a 20-day strike. In 1979, the Main Line Electrification Project was reconstituted into the Central Organisation for Railway Electrification (CORE). In 1980, the WAP-1 electric locomotives reached a speed of 130 kph.

1984–present: Rapid transit and later developments
The first metro rail was introduced in Calcutta on 24 October 1984 with the line between Esplanade and Bhowanipore. In 1986, computerized ticketing and reservations were introduced by Indian Railways. In 1988, the first Shatabdi Express was introduced between New Delhi and Jhansi. Two years later, the first self-printing ticket machine (SPTM) was introduced in Delhi. In 1993, air-conditioned three-tier and sleeper were introduced. In 1995, Chennai MRTS became the first operational elevated railway line in India. In 1995, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, a joint venture between Government of India and Government of Delhi was established. Centralized computer reservation system was deployed in Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai in September 1996, coupon validating machines (CVMs) were introduced at Mumbai CSMT in 1998 and the nationwide concierge system began operation on 18 April 1999. In 1999, the South East Central Railway zone was established and on 6 July 2002, the East Coast, South Western, South East Central, North Central, and West Central zones were created.

The Indian Railways website went online in February 2000. Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) was incorporated in 1999 and online ticketing was introduced on 3 August 2002 through IRCTC. The first line of the Delhi Metro was inaugurated on 24 December 2002. In 2012, Western Railway switched completely to AC traction with Central Railway following it in 2016. On 1 February 2014, Mumbai Monorail became the first operational monorail system in India. In 2015, the first Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) powered trains were rolled out. On 5 April 2016, Gatimaan Express, then India's fastest train with a maximum speed of 160 km/h, made its first run from New Delhi to Agra Cantonment.

The central government approved the merger of the Rail and General budgets from 2017. On 31 March 2017, Indian Railways announced a target of electrifying the entire rail network would be electrified by 2023. In March 2020, Indian Railways announced a nationwide shutdown of passenger service to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in India with the freight operations continuing to transport essential goods. The railways resumed passenger services in a phased manner in May 2020.

Starting in the 2010s, various infrastructure modernization projects have been undertaken including high-speed rail, redevelopment of 400 stations, doubling tracks to reduce congestion, refurbishing of coaches,  Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled tracking of trains and modernization of locomotives. In 2018, a semi-high speed self-propelled train-set capable of reaching speeds of over 160 kph was rolled out from ICF and the Vande Bharat Express was launched in 2019. Indian Railways announced plans to become a net-zero carbon emission railway by 2030 and has implemented rainwater harvesting at stations, reforestation along the tracks, introduction of solar-powered trains, installation of solar and wind power generation facilities, and sustainable LED lighting at all the stations. Indian railways removed all unstaffed level crossings by 2019 with staffed level crossings being replaced by bridges. Other safety projects include the extension of an automated fire alarm system to all air-conditioned coaches and GPS-enabled Fog Pilot Assistance System railway signalling devices. In 2020, Indian Railways allowed the operation of private passenger trains for the first time with the first train flagged off from Coimbatore in June 2022.

Rolling stock
Indian Railways hauls variety of cargo to cater to various requirements and have specialized rolling stock corresponding to the cargo hauled. There are 243 types of rolling stock used for cargo operations. These include covered wagons, boxcars, flat wagons, flatbeds, open wagons, hoppers, containers, automobile carriers, defense vehicle carriers and tankers. The freight cars can often carry loads from 10 to 80 tonnes per car depending on the configuration. A new wagon numbering system was adopted in Indian Railways in 2003. The requirement of wagons was previously met by Bharat wagon and engineering with the procurement and manufacturing now done by both in public and private sector. The earliest goods trains in the 1800s were hauled by imported steam locomotives. Locomotives are classified by various parameters including function (passenger/goods/mixed). Indian Railways uses dedicated electric locomotives such as WAG series (Wide AC Goods), dedicated diesel locomotives such as WDG series and diesel locomotives of mixed usage such as WDM series to haul freight trains.

Network and infrastructure
Indian railways operates a 65,093 km broad gauge network which is equipped with long-welded, high-tensile 52kg/60kg 90 UTS rails with pre-stressed concrete (PSC) sleepers and elastic fastenings. These tracks are shared by both freight and passenger trains with passenger trains often priortized on the network. The Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India was established in 2006 to construct dedicated freight corridors to reduce congestion, increase speed and reliability and proposed upgradation of existing goods sheds, attracting private capital to build dedicated logistics terminals.

Services
The first freight rail was operated between Bombay and Ahmedabad in 1966. Indian Railways ferries various commodities and cargo to cater to various industrial, consumer, and agricultural segments. Apart from dedicated freight trains, parcels, mail and small cargo are carried on specialized carriages attached to passenger trains. In 2022–23, Indian Railways operated 8,479 trains on average daily and transported 1418.1 million tonnes of freight. Indian Railways has historically subsidized the passenger segment with income from the freight business and hence, freight services were unable to complete other modes of transport on both cost and speed of delivery, leading to continuous erosion of market share till the early 2000s. To counter this, Indian Railways aimed to increase speed and reliability through various means including operating time-tabled freight trains and tweaking with the freight pricing/product mix. End-to-end integrated transport solutions such as roll-on, roll-off (RORO) service, a road-rail system pioneered by Konkan Railway in 1999 to carry trucks on flatbed trailers has been extended to other routes.

Rolling stock
The early rail coaches were based on a prototype by a Swiss company and were termed as ICF coaches after Integral coach factory (ICF), the first coach manufacturing unit in India. These coaches, manufactured from 1955 to 2018, were largely in use till the early 2010s. From the late 1990s, the ICF coaches were replaced by safer and newer LHB coaches designed by Linke-Hofmann-Busch of Germany. In the late 2010s, Indian railways started upgrading the coaches of select trains from LHB to new Tejas coaches with enhanced features. As of March 2022, Indian Railways' had 84,863 passenger coaches. Coaches are manufactured by five manufacturing units of the Indian Railways and public sector companies BEML and BHEL. The coaching stock have unique five or six digit identifiers. Till 2018, the first two digits indicating the year of manufacture and the last three digits indicating the class. In 2018, the numbering system was changed with the first two digits indicating the year of manufacture and the last four digits indicating the sequence number.

Network and infrastructure

 * Track

As of 31 March 2022, Indian railway network spans 128305 km of track length, 102831 km of running track length and 68,043 km of route length. Track sections are rated for speeds ranging from 80 to 200 km/h, though the maximum speed attained by passenger trains is 160 kph. Spanning 65,093 km broad gauge is the most used gauge with  metre gauge and  narrow gauge and  narrower gauge tracks limited to certain routes. Indian Railways uses a range of signalling technologies and methods to manage its train operations based on traffic density and safety requirements. It primarily uses coloured signal lights, which replaced the earlier semaphores and disc-based signalling.

 * Stations

As of March 2022, Indian Railways manages and operates 7,308 stations. Prior to 2017, the stations were classified into seven categories based on their earnings. Since 2017, Indian Railways categorizes the stations by commercial importance into three different categories namely Non Suburban Group (NSG), Suburban Group (SG) and Halt Group (HG). These are further subdivided into subcategories based on their commercial importance (NSG 1–6, SG 1-3 and from HG 1–3). The commercial importance of a station is determined by taking into account its passenger footfall, earnings and strategic importance and these categories are used to determine the minimum essential amenities required by each station.

Services

 * Travel classes

Indian Railways offers various travel classes on its coaches. For the purpose of identification in passenger trains, coaches in a train-set are assigned an alpha-numeric code. The first letter identifies the coach class and the second letter identifies the coach number. The berths and seats are numbered by an alphanumeric code with the letter(s) identifying the berth/seat type and numbers identifying the position. In standard coaches, the berths and seats are classified as follows:

Saloon coaches are also available for chartering which are equipped with a bedroom and kitchen and can be attached to normal trains.

 * Trains

Indian Railways operates various classes of passenger and express trains. The trains are classified basis average speed and facilities with express trains having fewer halts, priority on rail network and faster average speed. The trains are identified by five digit numbers with train-pairs traveling in opposite directions usually labelled with consecutive numbers. Express trains often have specific unique names for easy identification. In 2018–19, Indian Railways operated 13,523 passenger trains on average daily and carried 8.44 billion passengers. India Railways operates various categories of express trains including Rajdhani Express, Shatabdi Express, Garib Rath Express, Double Decker Express, Tejas Express, Gatimaan Express, Humsafar Express, Duronto Express, Yuva Express, Uday Express, Jan Shatabdi Express, Sampark Kranti Express, Vivek Express, Rajya Rani Express, Mahamana Express, Antyodaya Express, Jan Sadharan Express, Suvidha Express and Intercity Express.

Ticketing and fares
In 1986, computerized ticketing and reservations were introduced before which ticketing was done manually. Self-printing ticket machines (SPTM) were introduced in 1988. Centralized computer reservation system was deployed in September 1996. The ticketing network at stations is computerized with the exception of few stations. The Indian Railways website went online in February 2000 and online ticketing was introduced on 3 August 2002 through IRCTC. Indian Railways now provides multiple channels for passengers to book tickets through website, smartphone apps, SMS, rail reservation counters at train stations, or through private ticket booking counters. Reserved tickets may be booked up to 120 days in advance and confirmed reservation tickets will show the passenger and fare details along with berth or seat number(s) allocated to them on the ticket.

In case of no confirmed reservation, a wait-list number is assigned and wait-listed tickets get confirmed if there are cancellations of already reserved tickets. Reservation against cancellation tickets is an intermediate category between the waiting and confirmed lists in sleeper classes which allows a ticket holder to board the train and share a berth. Reserved tickets can be booked by passengers who want to travel at short notice at higher fares through the Tatkal train ticket, where no refund is applicable on cancellation. A valid proof for the purchase of ticket along with photo identification is required to board the train. Unreserved tickets for short distance or unplanned travels may be purchased at stations or through UTS mobile app at any time before departure. Holders of such tickets may only board the general or unreserved coaches. India has some of the lowest train fares in the world, and lower class passenger fares are subsidised. Discounted fares are applicable for railway employees, senior citizens (over age 60), the differently-abled, students, athletes, patients and those taking competitive examinations. Seats of lower class of accommodation are reserved for women or senior citizens in some trains.

Rolling stock
In 1980, the WAP-1 electric locomotives reached a speed of 130 kph. WAP-5 class locomotives, initially imported from ABB in 1995 and later manufactured at Chittaranjan Locomotive Works in India, reached 184 kph in trials. The locomotive later set an Indian speed record by hauling a train between Delhi and Agra at a speed of 160 kph in 2014. In 2018, a modified WAP-5A locomotive reached speeds of 200 kph in trials. In 2018, Integral Coach Factory in Chennai, rolled out a semi-high-speed EMU train-set, capable of reaching 180 kph. These trains have eight or sixteen coaches with driver cabins on both ends, which eliminates the time needed for turnaround at the terminal station with faster acceleration and deceleration, enabling the train to travel at a top speed for longer distance. For high-speed rail, the Indian railways will construct bullet train assembly facilities on a public-private participation (PPP) model with Japanese companies setting up manufacturing facilities in India to build the parts for bullet train sets.

Network and infrastructure
In 2009, Indian Railways envisioned a plan to increase the speed of passenger trains to 160-200 kph on dedicated conventional tracks and improve the existing conventional lines on Broad gauge to handle speeds of up to 160 kph. On 25 July 2013, Government of India established the High Speed Rail Corporation under Rail Vikas Nigam (RVNL) for the implementation of high-speed rail corridor projects. In 2014, the Diamond Quadrilateral high-speed rail network project was launched by Government of India and is envisioned to connect the four major metro cities of India namely: Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. , India does not have any operational high-speed tracks with the 174 km segment of track in the Tughlakabad– Agra Cantonment section supporting semi-high speeds of up to 160 kph. By 2026, Ministry of Railways envisaged to have top speeds of 300–350 kph with trains running on elevated corridors to isolate high-speed train tracks to prevent trespassing. Multiple feasibility studies have been done and probable routes have been identified. In 2017, a 508 km standard gauge line between Mumbai and Ahmedabad was approved for construction and is expected to be operational by 2028. RapidX system operating on Standard gauge tracks with Namo Bharat train-sets capable of supporting speeds of up to 180 kph, became operational with the partial opening of Delhi–Meerut line in 2023.

Services
Rajdhani Express, introduced in 1969 with a maximum speed of 120 kph was the fastest train service in the country in the 1970s. Shatabdi Express introduced in 1988, were capable of running at a maximum speed of 130 kph. In April 2016, WAP-5 hauled Gatimaan Express became the fastest commercial train in India, with a maximum operational speed of 160 kph. In 2019, the first Vande Bharat Express entered commercial service with a maximum operational speed of 160 kph. The actual operating speed was much lower due to track restrictions and congestion with top speeds restricted to 130 kph for most trains. In October 2023, Namo Bharat, built for RapidX by Alstom was launched and is capable of reaching speeds of up to 180 kph. In December 2023, two modified WAP-5 locomotives were used to haul the Amrit Bharat Express in a push-pull configuration, capable of reaching speeds of up to 160 kph.

Mountain railways
Mountain Railways of India refer to three rail lines operated by Indian Railways in hilly terrain. Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a narrow-gauge railway in the Lesser Himalayas of West Bengal was opened in 1881. The mountain railways were designated as World Heritage Sites in 1999. The Kalka-Shimla Railway, a narrow-gauge railway in the Siwalik Hills of Himachal Pradesh started operating in 1903. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway, a rack railway in the Nilgiri Hills of Tamil Nadu was opened in 1908 and is the only operational rack railway in India. These railways operate with its own dedicated fleet of locomotives and coaches.

Tourist trains
Indian Railways operates tourist trains and coach services on popular tourist circuits in different regions of the country. It operates luxury tourist trains such as Maharajas' Express, Palace on Wheels, Golden Chariot and Deccan Odyssey, deluxe tourist trains such as Mahaparinirvan Express. It also operates heritage and exhibition trains on special circumstances.

Cross-border services
India shares land border with multiple countries and have rail-links with some of them. Bangladesh is connected to West Bengal with a construction of new rail link connecting Tripura with Akhaura. Two rail links to Nepal exist as of 2021, with a third under construction. There is an existing railink with Pakistan through Attari–Wagah border.

Private railways
The state-owned Indian Railways has an almost monopoly over rail operations. There are a few private railway lines used exclusively for transporting freight and to connect with the wider network. Private railways are operated by various ports such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Visakhapatnam, Pipavav and the Bhilai Steel Plant. The Tata Group operates a few funicular railways. In 2020, Indian Railways allowed the operation of private passenger trains for the first time with the first train flagged off from Coimbatore in June 2022.

Rolling stock
In the 1960s, Electric multiple units (EMU) were developed for short-haul and suburban rail transit. On short-distance routes, Mainline electrical multiple unit (MEMU) and Diesel electrical multiple unit (DEMU) trains are also run. These train sets run in formation of 6, 9, 12 or 15 coaches and a three-car set is typified by a motor coaches and two passenger coaches. These train-sets are self-propelled with capability for faster acceleration or deceleration.

Network
Suburban lines were built starting with Bombay in 1853, followed by Calcutta and Madras in the later years. The first 1.5kV DC electrified tracks became operational in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1957, 25 kV AC traction was adopted for suburban lines.

Services
The first suburban electric trains were introduced in Bombay in 1925. Chennai suburban started operating in 1931 and Kolkata in 1957. Opened in November 1995, Chennai MRTS became the first operational elevated railway line in India. Indian Railways operates suburban railway systems across the cities of Mumbai (suburban), Chennai (suburban and MRTS), Kolkata (suburban) and Secunderabad (MMTS) covering six railway zones. Suburban networks issue unreserved tickets valid for a limited time or season passes with unlimited travel between two stops for a period of time.

Rolling stock
Metro trains use electric multiple unit train-sets manufactured by various state-owned and private companies. The trains operate on 25 KV AC through an overhead catenary system with a maximum speed of 120 km/h.

Network
The urban rail transit in India consists of systems such as rapid transit (Metro), suburban rail (operated by Indian railways), light rail (Metrolite), tram, regional rail and monorail. As of 2023, India has the fourth longest length of metro lines with 895 km. Urban rail transit systems in India mostly use standard gauge tracks except a single line of Kolkata Metro and three lines of Delhi Metro which use the same broad gauge tracks as main-line railways. These systems are operated by rail corporations independent of Indian Railways. All metro routes are electrified with DC or 25 kV AC traction with many metro routes employing the third rail method for electric traction.

Services
Metro trains operate in Kolkata, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kochi, Nagpur, Ahmedabad and Lucknow. Gurgaon has a Metro system operated by a private organisation. Metro tracks are being constructed or planned in all million-plus cities in the country.

Others
Apart from standard passenger and freight services, the Indian Railways operates other specialized coaches with various functions. These include accident relief medical vans, military cars, inspection carriages, and parcel vans. Various coaches such as pantry car, generator cars, and brake vans are attached to train-sets.

Manufacturing and maintenance
Indian Railways operates various manufacturing units. Chittaranjan Locomotive Works (CLW), commissioned in 1950, was the first locomotive manufacturing unit in India. The first rail coache manufacturing unit, the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) was established at Madras in 1956. Banaras Locomotive Works (BLW), commissioned in 1961, is the second locomotive manufacturing unit operated by Indian Railways. Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), Patiala Locomotive Works, Diesel Locomotive Factory, Marhowrah and Electric Locomotive Factory, Madhepura also manufacture locomotives in India. Railway coaches are also manufactured at coach factories at Karputhala, Raebareli, Sonipat and Latur. Indian Railways also operates two rail wheel manufacturing factories at Bangalore and Chhpra. The locomotives are operated and maintained by 44 locomotive sheds. Indian Railways also maintains 37 sheds for the maintenance of multiple unit train-sets. The repair and maintenance of the fleet of other rolling stock is carried out at 212 carriage & wagon repair units and 45 periodic overhaul workshops across various zones of IR. Metro coaches are manufactured by various companies including state-owned ICF, BEML and private companies like Alstom, Mitsubishi, Hyundai Rotem, Bombardier, Siemens, CRRC, Titagarh Firema and CAF with the respective metro systems maintaining their own maintenance depots.

Accidents and incidents
According to the India's National Crime Records Bureau, in 2021, more than 16,000 people were killed in almost 18,000 railway accidents across India. Almost 68 percent of the railway accidents were due to falls from trains and collisions between trains and people on the track. In the same year, almost 2000 people were killed in around 1500 rail-road crossing accidents across India.

title: Rail transport in India


text:
Mailing list

A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the list".

Types
At least two types of mailing lists can be defined:
 * an announcement list is closer to the original sense, where a "mailing list" of people was used as a recipient for newsletters, periodicals or advertising. Traditionally this was done through the postal system, but with the rise of email, the electronic mailing list became popular. This type of list is used primarily as a one-way conduit of information and may only be "posted to" by selected people. This may also be referred to by the term newsletter. Newsletter and promotional emailing lists are employed in various sectors as parts of direct marketing campaigns.
 * a "discussion list" allows subscribing members (sometimes even people outside the list) to post their own items which are broadcast to all of the other mailing list members. Recipients may answer in a similar fashion, thus, actual discussion and information exchanges can occur. Mailing lists of this type are usually topic-oriented (for example, politics, scientific discussion, health problems, joke contests), and the topic may range from extremely narrow to "whatever you think could interest us." In this they are similar to Usenet newsgroups, another form of discussion group that may have an aversion to off-topic messages.

Historically mailing lists preceded email/web forums; both can provide analogous functionalities. When used in that fashion, mailing lists are sometimes known as discussion lists or discussion forums. Discussion lists provide some advantages over typical web forums, so they are still used in various projects, notably Git and Debian. The advantages over web forums include the ability to work offline, the ability to sign/encrypt posts via GPG, and the ability to use an e-mail client's features, such as filters.

Tracking
Mailers want to know when items are delivered, partly to know how to staff call centers. Salting (or seeding) their lists enables them to compare delivery times, especially when time-of-year affects arrival delays. It may also provide information about poor handling of samples.

Having seeded entries in an eMail list simplifies tracking who may have "borrowed" the list without permission.

More definitions
When similar or identical material is sent out to all subscribers on a mailing list, it is often referred to as a mailshot or a blast. A list for such use can also be referred to as a distribution list.

On legitimate (non-spam) mailing lists, individuals can subscribe or unsubscribe themselves.

Mailing lists are often rented or sold. If rented, the renter agrees to use the mailing list only at contractually agreed-upon times. The mailing list owner typically enforces this by "salting" (known as "seeding" in direct mail) the mailing list with fake addresses and creating new salts for each time the list is rented. Unscrupulous renters may attempt to bypass salts by renting several lists and merging them to find common, valid addresses.

Mailing list brokers exist to help organizations rent their lists. For some list owners, such as specialized niche publications or charitable groups, their lists may be some of their most valuable assets, and mailing list brokers help them maximize the value of their lists. Transmission may be paper-based or electronic. Each has its strengths, although a 2022 article claimed that compared to email, "direct mail still brings in the lion's share of revenue for most organizations."

A mailing list is simply a list of e-mail addresses of people who are interested in the same subject, are members of the same work group, or who are taking classes together. When a member of the list sends a note to the group's special address, the e-mail is broadcast to all of the members of the list. The key advantage of a mailing list over things such as web-based discussion is that as the new message becomes available they are immediately delivered to the participants' mailboxes. A mailing list sometimes can also include information such as phone number, postal address, fax number, and more.

Electronic mailing list
An electronic mailing list or email list is a special use of email that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. It is similar to a traditional mailing list – a list of names and addresses – as might be kept by an organization for sending publications to its members or customers, but typically refers to four things:
 * a list of email addresses,
 * the people ("subscribers") receiving mail at those addresses, thus defining a community gathered around a topic of interest.
 * the publications (email messages) sent to those addresses, and
 * a reflector, which is a single email address that, when designated as the recipient of a message, will send a copy of that message to all of the subscribers.

Mechanism
Electronic mailing lists usually are fully or partially automated through the use of special mailing list software and a reflector address set up on a server capable of receiving email. Incoming messages sent to the reflector address are processed by the software, and, depending on their content, are acted upon internally (in the case of messages containing commands directed at the software itself) or are distributed to all email addresses subscribed to the mailing list.

A web-based interface is often available to allow people to subscribe, unsubscribe, and change their preferences. However, mailing list servers existed long before the World Wide Web, so most also accept commands over email to a special email address. This allows subscribers (or those who want to be subscribers) to perform such tasks as subscribing and unsubscribing, temporarily halting the sending of messages to them, or changing available preferences – all via email. The common format for sending these commands is to send an email that contains simply the command followed by the name of the electronic mailing list the command pertains to. Examples: subscribe anylist or subscribe anylist John Doe.

Electronic mailing list servers may be set to forward messages to subscribers of a particular mailing list either individually as they are received by the list server, or in digest form in which all messages received on a particular day by the list server are combined into one email that is sent once per day to subscribers. Some mailing lists allow individual subscribers to decide how they prefer to receive messages from the list server (individual or digest).

History
Mailing lists have first been scholarly mailing lists. The genealogy of mailing lists as a communication tool between scientists can be traced back to the times of the fledgling Arpanet. The aim of the computer scientists involved in this project was to develop protocols for the communication between computers. In so doing, they have also built the first tools of human computer-mediated communication. Broadly speaking, the scholarly mailing lists can even be seen as the modern version of the salons of the Enlightenment ages, designed by scholars for scholars.

The "threaded conversation" structure (where the header of a first post defines the topic of a series of answers thus constituting a thread) is a typical and ubiquitous structure of discourse within lists and fora of the Internet. It is pivotal to the structure and topicality of debates within mailing lists as an arena, or public sphere in Habermas wording. The flame wars (as the liveliest episodes) give valuable and unique information to historians to comprehend what is at stake in the communities gathered around lists.

Anthropologists, sociologists and historians have used mailing lists as fieldwork. Topics include TV series fandom, online culture, or scientific practices among many other academic studies. From the historian's point of view, the issue of the preservation of mailing lists heritage (and Internet fora heritage in general) is essential. Not only the text of the corpus of messages has yet to be perennially archived, but also their related metadata, timestamps, headers that define topics, etc. Mailing lists archives are a unique opportunity for historians to explore interactions, debates, even tensions that reveal a lot about communities.

List security
On both discussion lists and newsletter lists precautions are taken to avoid spamming.

Discussion lists often require every message to be approved by a moderator before being sent to the rest of the subscribers (moderated lists), although higher-traffic lists typically only moderate messages from new subscribers. Companies sending out promotional newsletters have the option of working with whitelist mail distributors, which agree to standards and high fines from ISPs should any of the opt-in subscribers complain. In exchange for their compliance and agreement to prohibitive fines, the emails sent by whitelisted companies are not blocked by spam filters, which often can reroute these legitimate, non-spam emails.

Subscription
Some mailing lists are open to anyone who wants to join them, while others require an approval from the list owner before one may join. Joining a mailing list is called "subscribing" and leaving a list is called "unsubscribing".

Archives
A mailing list archive is a collection of past messages from one or more electronic mailing lists. Such archives often include searching and indexing functionality. Many archives are directly associated with the mailing list, but some organizations, such as Gmane, collect archives from multiple mailing lists hosted at different organizations; thus, one message sent to one popular mailing list may end up in many different archives. Gmane had over 9,000 mailing list archives as of 16 January 2007. Some popular free software programs for collecting mailing list archives are Hypermail, MHonArc, FUDforum, and public-inbox (which is notably used for archiving the Linux kernel mailing list along with many other software development mailing lists and has a web-service API used by search-and-retrieval tools intended for use by the Linux kernel development community  ).

Listwashing
Listwashing is the process through which individual entries in mailing lists are to be removed. These mailing lists typically contain email addresses or phone numbers of those that have not voluntarily subscribed. Only complainers are removed via this process. Because most of those that have not voluntarily subscribed stay on the list, this helps spammers to maintain a low-complaint list of spammable email addresses. Internet service providers who forward complaints to the spamming party are often seen as assisting the spammer in list washing, or, in short, helping spammers. Most legitimate list holders provide their customers with listwashing and data deduplication service regularly for free or a small fee.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Mailing list


text:
Jerky

Jerky is lean trimmed meat cut into strips and dehydrated to prevent spoilage. Normally, this drying includes the addition of salt to prevent bacteria growth. The word "jerky" derives from the Quechua word ch'arki which means "dried, salted meat".

Modern manufactured jerky is often marinated, prepared with a seasoned spice rub or liquid, or smoked with low heat (usually under 70 °C/160 °F). Store-bought jerky commonly includes sweeteners such as brown sugar.

Jerky is ready-to-eat, needs no additional preparation and can be stored for months without refrigeration. To ensure maximum shelf-life, a proper protein-to-moisture content is required in the final cured product.

Many products which are sold as jerky consist of highly processed, chopped and formed meat rather than traditional sliced whole-muscle meat. These products may contain more fat, but moisture content, as in the whole-muscle product, must meet a 0.75 to 1 moisture-to protein ratio in the US.

Preparation
Jerky is made from domesticated animals as well as game animals. Jerky from domesticated animals includes beef, pork, goat and mutton or lamb and game animals such as deer, kudu, springbok, kangaroo, and bison are also used. Recently, other animals such as turkey, ostrich, salmon, chicken, duck, goose, shrimps, oxen, squids, octopuses, alligator, pigeon, crocodile, tuna, emu, horse, camel, lion, bear, snake and earthworm have entered the market.

Most fat must be trimmed from the meat prior to drying, as fat increases the chances of spoilage (modern vacuum packing and chemical preservatives have served to help prevent these risks). The meat must be dried quickly to limit bacterial growth during the critical period where the meat is not yet dry. To accomplish drying quickly without the use of high temperature, which would cook the meat, the meat must be sliced or pressed thin.

In industrial settings, large low-temperature drying ovens with many heater elements and fans make use of exhaust ports to remove the moisture-laden air. The combination of fast-moving air and low heat dries the meat to the desired moisture content within a few hours. The raw, marinated jerky strips are placed on racks of nylon-coated metal screens which have been sprayed with a light vegetable oil to allow the meat to be removed easily. The screen trays are placed closely in layers on rolling carts which are then put in the drying oven.

Chemical preservatives, such as sodium nitrite, are often used in conjunction with the historical salted drying procedure to prepare jerky. Smoking is the most traditional method, as it preserves, flavors, and dries the meat simultaneously. Salting is the most common method used today, as it both provides seasoning to improve the flavor as well as preserve the meat. While some methods involve applying the seasonings with a marinade, this can increase the drying time by adding moisture to the meat.

Packaging
After the jerky is dried to the proper moisture content to prevent spoilage, it is cooled, then packaged in (often resealable) plastic bags, either nitrogen gas flushed or vacuumed packed. To prevent the oxidation of the fat, the sealed packages often contain small pouches of oxygen absorber. These small packets are filled with iron particles which react with oxygen, removing the oxygen from the sealed jerky package, and from an opened and resealed unfinished packet.

Because of the necessary low fat and moisture content, jerky is high in protein. A 30 g (about 1 oz) portion of lean meat, for example, contains about 7 g of protein. By removing 15 g of water from the meat, the protein ratio is doubled to nearly 15 g of protein per 30 g portion. In some low moisture varieties, a 30 g serving will contain 21 g of protein, and only one g of fat. The price per unit weight of this type of jerky is higher than less-dried forms, as it takes 90 g of 99% lean meat to generate 30 g of jerky.

Unpackaged fresh jerky made from sliced, whole muscle meat has been available in specialty stores in Hong Kong at least since the 1970s. The products are purchased by kilograms, and customers choose from 10 to 20 types of meat used to make the product. Some are sold in strands instead of slices. Macau has opened numerous specialty shops also, many of which are franchise extensions of stores from Hong Kong. Compared to the sealed packaged versions, unpackaged jerky has a relatively short shelf life.

This type of jerky has also become very popular in convenience stores in the United States under the name "slab" jerky; it is usually sold in clear plastic containers.

Regulation
Most nations have regulations pertaining to the production of dried meat products. There are strict requirements to ensure safe and wholesome production of jerky products. Factories are required to have inspectors and sanitation plans. In the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is responsible for that oversight. To comply with USDA regulations, poultry jerky must be heated to an internal temperature of 160 °F (71 °C) for uncured poultry or 155 °F (68 °C) for cured poultry to be considered safe. Many European Union countries presently prohibit the importation of meat products, including jerky, without additional and extensive customs documentation, and further inspections.

Nutrition
A typical 30 g portion of fresh jerky contains 10–15 g of protein, 1 g of fat, and 0–3 g of carbohydrates, although some beef jerky can have a protein content above 65%. Since traditional jerky recipes use a basic salt cure, sodium can be a concern for some people. A 30 g serving of jerky could contain more than 600 mg of sodium, which would be about 30% of the recommended USRDA.

Ch'arki
Ch'arki (Quechua for dried, salted meat, Hispanicized spellings charque, charqui, charquí) is a dried, salted meat product. Andean charqui, made in Peru, Bolivia and Chile, is from alpaca, llama or alpaca-llama cross-breeds. Peru is the world's largest producer with approximately 450 tons produced per year. Brazilian charque is made from beef.

The manufacture of charqui principally consists of salting and sun-drying. In some regions, such as in Puno, the meat is sliced before drying; in others, like Cusco, the meat is dried from whole bone-in carcass pieces, known as 'charqui completo'.

It was industrialized in charqueadas (in Brazil) or saladeros (in Argentina and Uruguay). In the United States ch'arki was Anglicised as jerky.

When encountered by the Spanish, the Inca Empire supplied tampu (inns) along the Inca road system with llama ch'arki for travelers. The Inca used a freeze drying process that took advantage of their cold dry mountain air and strong sun.

title: Jerky


text:
Nim Chimpsky

Neam "Nim" Chimpsky (November 19, 1973 – March 10, 2000) was a chimpanzee and the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University. The project was led by Herbert S. Terrace with the linguistic analysis headed up by psycholinguist Thomas Bever. Within the context of a scientific study, Chimpsky was named as a pun on linguist Noam Chomsky, who posits that humans are "wired" to develop language.

As part of a study intended to challenge Chomsky's thesis that only humans have language, beginning at two weeks old, Nim was raised by a family in a home environment by human surrogate parents. The surrogate parents already had a human child of their own. At the age of two, Nim was removed from his surrogate parents and taken to Columbia University due to perceived behavioral difficulties. The project was similar to an earlier study by R. Allen and Beatrix Gardner in which another chimpanzee, Washoe, was raised like a human child. After reviewing the results, Terrace concluded that Nim, who at this point was housed at Columbia University, mimicked symbols of the American Sign Language from his teachers in order to get a reward but did not understand the language nor could he create sentences; Nim used random patterns until receiving a reward. Mainly, Terrace claimed that he had noticed that Nim mimicked the signs used moments before by his teacher, which Terrace, by his own words, had not noticed throughout the duration of the entire study but only moments before thinking of greenlighting the study as a success. Terrace further argued that all ape-language studies, including Project Nim, were based on misinformation from the chimpanzees, which he also only noticed and examined in such a manner at and after said moment of realization. Terrace's work remains controversial today, with no clear consensus among psychologists and cognitive scientists regarding the extent to which great apes can learn language.

Project Nim
Project Nim was an attempt to go further than Project Washoe. Terrace and his colleagues aimed to use more thorough experimental techniques, and the intellectual discipline of the experimental analysis of behavior, so that the linguistic abilities of the apes could be put on a more secure footing.

Roger Fouts wrote: "Since 98.7% of the DNA in humans and chimps is identical, some scientists (but not Noam Chomsky) believed that a chimpanzee raised in a human family, and using American Sign Language (ASL), would shed light on the way language is acquired and used by humans. Project Nim, headed by behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace at Columbia University, was conceived in the early 1970s as a challenge to Chomsky's thesis that only humans have language."

Attention was particularly focused on Nim's ability to make different responses to different sequences of signs and to emit different sequences in order to communicate different meanings. However, the results, according to Fouts, were not as impressive as had been reported from the Washoe project. Terrace, however, was skeptical of Project Washoe and, according to the critics, went to great lengths to discredit it.

While Nim did learn 125 signs, Terrace concluded that he had not acquired anything the researchers were prepared to designate worthy of the name "language" (as defined by Noam Chomsky) although he had learned to repeat his trainers' signs in appropriate contexts. Language is defined as a "doubly articulated" system, in which signs are formed for objects and states and then combined syntactically, in ways that determine how their meanings will be understood. For example, "man bites dog" and "dog bites man" use the same set of words but because of their ordering will be understood by speakers of English as denoting very different meanings.

One of Terrace's colleagues, Laura-Ann Petitto, estimated that with more standard criteria, Nim's true vocabulary count was closer to 25 than 125. However, other students who cared for Nim longer than Petitto disagreed with her and with the way that Terrace conducted his experiment. Critics assert that Terrace used his analysis to destroy the movement of ape-language research. Terrace argued that none of the chimpanzees were using language, because they could learn signs but could not form them syntactically as language.

Terrace and his colleagues concluded that the chimpanzee did not show any meaningful sequential behavior that rivaled human grammar. Nim's use of language was strictly pragmatic, as a means of obtaining an outcome, unlike a human child's, which can serve to generate or express meanings, thoughts or ideas. There was nothing Nim could be taught that could not equally well be taught to a pigeon using the principles of operant conditioning. The researchers therefore questioned claims made on behalf of Washoe, and argued that the apparently impressive results may have amounted to nothing more than a "Clever Hans" effect, not to mention a relatively informal experimental approach.

Critics of primate linguistic studies include Thomas Sebeok, American semiotician and investigator of nonhuman communication systems, who wrote: "In my opinion, the alleged language experiments with apes divide into three groups: one, outright fraud; two, self-deception; three, those conducted by Terrace. The largest class by far is the middle one."

Sebeok also made pointed comparisons of Washoe with Clever Hans. Some evolutionary psychologists, in effect agreeing with Chomsky, argue that the apparent impossibility of teaching language to non-human animals is indicative that the ability to use language is an innately human development.

Objections
Terrace's skeptical approach to the claims that chimpanzees could learn and understand sign language led to heated disputes with Allen and Beatrix Gardner, who initiated the Washoe Project. The Gardners argued that Terrace's approach to training, and the use of many different assistants, did not harness the chimpanzee's full cognitive and linguistic resources.

Roger Fouts, of the Washoe Project, also claims that Project Nim was poorly conducted because it did not use strong enough methodology to avoid comparison to "Clever Hans" and efficiently defend against it. He also shares the Gardners' view that the process of acquiring language skills through natural social interactions gives substantially better results than behavioral conditioning. Fouts argues, based on his own experiments, that pure conditioning can lead to the use of language as a method mainly of getting rewards rather than of raising communication abilities. Fouts later reported, however, that a community of ASL-speaking chimpanzees (including Washoe herself) was spontaneously using this language as a part of their internal communication system. They have even directly taught ASL signs to their children (Loulis) without human help or intervention. This means not only that they can use the language but that it has become a significant part of their lives.

The controversy is still not fully resolved, in part because the financial and other costs of carrying out language-training experiments with apes make replication studies difficult to mount. The definitions of both "language" and "imitation" as well as the question of how language-like Nim's performance was has remained controversial.

Retirement and death
When Terrace ended the experiment, Nim was transferred back to the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma, where he struggled to adapt after being treated like a human child for the first decade of his life. He had also never previously met another chimpanzee and had to get used to them.

When Terrace made his one and only visit to see Nim after a year at the Institute of Primate Studies, Nim sprung to Terrace immediately after seeing him, visibly shaking with excitement. Nim also showed the progress he had made during Project Nim, as he immediately began conversing in sign language with Terrace. Nim retreated back to a depressed state after Terrace, who was never to return again, left. Nim developed friendships with several of the workers at the Institute of Primate Studies, and learned a few more signs, including a sign named "stone smoke time now" which indicated that Nim wanted to smoke marijuana.

The Institute later sold Nim to the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP), a pharmaceutical animal testing laboratory managed by NYU. At LEMSIP, Nim was confined to a wire cage, slated to be used for hepatitis vaccine studies. Technicians caring for the chimpanzees noted that Nim and other chimpanzees from the Institute continued to make sign-language gestures. After efforts to free him, Nim was purchased by the Black Beauty Ranch, operated by The Fund for Animals, the group led by Cleveland Amory, in Texas. While Nim's quality of life improved at the Black Beauty Ranch, Nim lived primarily in isolation inside a pen. He began to show hostility that included throwing TVs and killing a dog. Nim's behavior and overall well-being improved when other chimpanzees, several from the LEMSIP, joined Nim inside his pen after about a decade at the Black Beauty Ranch. Nim continued to show signs of the sign language he learned decades ago whenever a former trainer at the Institute for Primate Studies went to visit him.

Nim died on March 10, 2000, at the age of 26, from a heart attack.

Quotations
All quotations appear in the original article by Terrace and colleagues.

 * Three-sign quotations

 * Apple me eat
 * Banana Nim eat
 * Banana me eat
 * Drink me Nim
 * Eat Nim eat
 * Eat Nim me
 * Eat me Nim
 * Eat me eat
 * Finish hug Nim
 * Give me eat
 * Grape eat Nim
 * Hug me Nim
 * Me Nim eat
 * Me more eat
 * More eat Nim
 * Nut Nim nut
 * Play me Nim
 * Tickle me Nim
 * Tickle me eat
 * Yogurt Nim eat

 * Four-sign quotations

 * Banana Nim banana Nim
 * Banana eat me Nim
 * Banana me Nim me
 * Banana me eat banana
 * Drink Nim drink Nim
 * Drink eat drink eat
 * Drink eat me Nim
 * Eat Nim eat Nim
 * Eat drink eat drink
 * Eat grape eat Nim
 * Eat me Nim drink
 * Grape eat Nim eat
 * Grape eat me Nim
 * Me Nim eat me
 * Me eat drink more
 * Me eat me eat
 * Me gum me gum
 * Nim eat Nim eat
 * Play me Nim play
 * Tickle me Nim play

Nim's longest "sentence" was the 16-word-long "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."
 * Longest recorded quotation

In media
Project Nim, a documentary film by James Marsh about the Nim study, explores the story (and the wealth of archival footage) to consider ethical issues, the emotional experiences of the trainers and the chimpanzee, and the deeper issues the experiment raised. This documentary (produced by BBC Films, Red Box Films, and Passion Films) opened the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The film was released in theaters on July 8, 2011 by Roadside Attractions, and was released on DVD on February 7, 2012.

The story of Nim and other language-learning animals is told in Eugene Linden's book Silent Partners: The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments.

title: Nim Chimpsky


text:
Alan Sillitoe

Alan Sillitoe FRSL (4 March 1928 – 25 April 2010) was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his early short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", both of which were adapted into films.

Biography
Sillitoe was born in Nottingham to working-class parents, Christopher Sillitoe and Sabina (née Burton). Like Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his father worked at the Raleigh Bicycle Company's factory in the town. His father was illiterate, violent, and unsteady with his jobs, and the family was often on the brink of starvation.

Sillitoe left school at the age of 14, having failed the entrance examination to grammar school. He worked at the Raleigh factory for the next four years, spending his free time reading prodigiously and being a "serial lover of local girls". He joined the Air Training Corps in 1942, then the Royal Air Force, albeit too late to serve in the Second World War. He served as a wireless operator in Malaya during the Emergency. After returning to Britain he was planning to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force when it was discovered that he had tuberculosis. He spent 16 months in an RAF hospital.

Pensioned off at the age of 21 on 45 shillings (£2.25) a week, he lived in France and Spain for seven years in an attempt to recover. In 1955, while living in Mallorca with the American poet Ruth Fainlight, whom he married in 1959, and in contact with the poet Robert Graves, Sillitoe started work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was published in 1958. Influenced in part by the stripped-down prose of Ernest Hemingway, the book conveys the attitudes and situation of a young factory worker faced with the inevitable end of his youthful philandering. As with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and John Braine's Room at the Top, the novel's real subject was the disillusionment of post-war Britain and the lack of opportunities for the working class. It was adapted as a film by Karel Reisz in 1960, with Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton; the screenplay was written by Sillitoe.

Sillitoe's story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which concerns the rebellion of a borstal boy with a talent for running, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1959. It was also adapted into a film, in 1962, directed by Tony Richardson and starring Tom Courtenay. Sillitoe again wrote the screenplay.

With Fainlight he had a child, David. They later adopted another, Susan. Sillitoe lived at various times in Kent, London and Montpellier. In London he was friendly with the bookseller Bernard Stone (who had been born in Nottingham a few years before Sillitoe) and became one of the bohemian crowd that congregated at Stone's Turret Bookshop on Kensington Church Walk.

In the 1960s Sillitoe was celebrated in the Soviet Union as a spokesman for the "oppressed worker" in the West. Invited to tour the country, he visited several times in the 1960s and in 1968 he was asked to address the Congress of Soviet Writers' Unions, where he denounced Soviet human rights abuses, many of which he had witnessed.

In 1990 Sillitoe was awarded an honorary degree by Nottingham Polytechnic, now Nottingham Trent University. The city's older Russell Group university, the University of Nottingham, also awarded him an honorary D.Litt. in 1994. In 2006 his best-known play was staged at the university's Lakeside Arts theatre in an in-house production.

Sillitoe wrote many novels and several volumes of poems. His autobiography, Life Without Armour, which was critically acclaimed on publication in 1995, offers a view of his squalid childhood. In an interview Sillitoe claimed that "A writer, if he manages to earn a living at what he's doing, even if it's a very poor living, acquires some of the attributes of the old-fashioned gentleman (if I can be so silly)."

Gadfly in Russia, an account of his travels in Russia spanning 40 years, was published in 2007. In 2008 London Books republished A Start in Life in its London Classics series to mark the author's 80th birthday. Sillitoe appeared on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 on 25 January 2009.

Sillitoe's long-held desire for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to be remade for a contemporary filmgoing audience was never achieved, despite strong efforts. Danny Brocklehurst was to adapt the book and Sillitoe gave his blessing to the project, but Tony Richardson's estate and Woodfall Films prevented it from going ahead.

Sillitoe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.

Death
Sillitoe died of cancer on 25 April 2010 at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He was 82. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Novels

 * Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, London: Allen, 1958; New York:  Knopf, 1959. New edition (1968) has an introduction by Sillitoe, commentary and notes by David Craig. Longman edition (1976) has a sequence of Nottingham photographs, and stills from the film, Harlow.
 * The General, London: Allen, 1960; New York: Knopf, 1961
 * Key to the Door, London: Allen, 1961; New York: Knopf, 1962; reprinted, with a new preface by Sillitoe, London: Allen, 1978
 * The Death of William Posters, London: Allen, 1965; New York: Knopf, 1965
 * A Tree on Fire, London: Macmillan, 1967; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968
 * A Start in Life, London: Allen, 1970; New York: Scribners, 1971
 * Travels in Nihilon, London: Allen, 1971; New York: Scribners, 1972
 * The Flame of Life, London: Allen, 1974
 * The Widower's Son, Allen, 1976; New York: Harper & Row, 1977
 * The Storyteller, London: Allen, 1979; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.
 * Her Victory, London: Granada, 1982; New York: Watts, 1982
 * The Lost Flying Boat, London: Granada, 1983; Boston: Little, Brown, 1983
 * Down from the Hill, London: Granada, 1984
 * Life Goes On, London: Granada, 1985
 * Out of the Whirlpool. London: Hutchinson, 1987
 * The Open Door, London: Grafton/Collins, 1989
 * Last Loves, London: Grafton, 1990; Boston: Chivers, 1991
 * Leonard's War: A Love Story. London: HarperCollins, 1991
 * Snowstop, London: HarperCollins, 1993
 * The Broken Chariot, London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1998
 * The German Numbers Woman, London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1999
 * Birthday, London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 2001
 * A Man of His Time, Flamingo (UK), 2004, ISBN 0-00-717327-X; Harper Perennial (US), 2005. ISBN 0-00-717328-8; ISBN 978-0-00-717328-0

Collections of short stories

 * The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, London: Allen, 1959; New York: Knopf, 1960
 * The Ragman’s Daughter and Other Stories, London: Allen, 1963; New York: Knopf, 1964
 * Guzman, Go Home, and Other Stories, London: Macmillan, 1968; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969; reprinted, with a new preface by Sillitoe, London; Allen, 1979
 * Men, Women and Children, London: Allen, 1973; New York: Scribners, 1974
 * Down to the Bone, Exeter: Wheaton, 1976
 * The Second Chance and Other Stories, London: Cape, 1981; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981
 * The Far Side of the Street: Fifteen Short Stories, London: Allen, 1988
 * Alligator Playground: A Collection of Short Stories, Flamingo, 1997, ISBN 0-00-655073-8
 * New and Collected Stories, Carroll and Graf, 2005. ISBN 0-7867-1476-X

Compilations

 * Every Day of the Week: An Alan Sillitoe Reader, with an introduction by John Sawkins London: Allen, 1987
 * Collected Stories, London: Flamingo, 1995; New York: HarperCollins, 1996

Writing for children

 * The City Adventures of Marmalade Jim, London: Macmillan, 1967; Toronto: Macmillan, 1967; revised ed., London: Robson, 1977
 * Big John and the Stars, London: Robson, 1977
 * The Incredible Fencing Fleas, London: Robson, 1978. Illus. Mike Wilks.
 * Marmalade Jim at the Farm, London: Robson, 1980
 * Marmalade Jim and the Fox, London: Robson, 1984

Essays/travel

 * Road to Volgograd, London: Allen, 1964; New York: Knopf, 1964
 * Raw Material, London: Allen, 1972; New York: Scribners, 1973; rev. ed., London: Pan Books, 1974; further revised, London: Star Books, 1978; further revised, London: Allen, 1979
 * Mountains and Caverns: Selected Essays, London: Allen, 1975
 * Words Broadsheet Nineteen, by Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. Bramley, Surrey: Words Press, 1975. Broadside
 * "The Interview", London: The 35s (Women's Campaign for Soviet Jewry), 1976
 * Israel: Poems on a Hebrew Theme, with drawings by Ralph Steadman; London: Steam Press, 1981 98 copies.
 * The Saxon Shore Way: From Gravesend to Rye, by Sillitoe and Fay Godwin. London: Hutchinson, 1983
 * Alan Sillitoe’s Nottinghamshire, with photographs by David Sillitoe. London: Grafton, 1987
 * Shylock the Writer, London: Turret Bookshop, 1991
 * The Mentality of the Picaresque Hero, London: Turret Bookshop, 1993, Turret Papers, no. 2. (500 copies)
 * Leading the Blind: A Century of Guidebook Travel. 1815-1914, London: Macmillan, 1995
 * Gadfly in Russia, JR Books, 2007

Plays

 * Three Plays, London: Allen, 1978 Contains The Slot-Machine, The Interview, Pit Strike

Autobiography

 * Life Without Armour, (HarperCollins, 1995) ISBN 0-00-255570-0, ISBN 978-0-00-255570-8

Collections of poems

 * Without Beer or Bread, Dulwich Village: Outposts, 1957
 * The Rats and Other Poems, London: Allen, 1960
 * Falling Out of Love and Other Poems, London; Allen, 1964; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964
 * Shaman and Other Poems", Turret, 1968 (Limited ed. of 500 copies, 100 copies signed and numbered)
 * Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems, London: Macmillan, 1968; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
 * Poems, by Sillitoe, Ruth Fainlight and Ted Hughes; London: Rainbow Press, 1971. (300 copies)
 * From Canto Two of The Rats, Wittersham, Kent: Alan Sillitoe, 1973
 * Barbarians and Other Poems, London: Turret Books, 1973. 500 copies
 * Storm: New Poems, London: Allen, 1974
 * Somme, London: Steam Press, 1974. In Steam Press Portfolio, no. 2. 50 copies
 * Day-Dream Communiqué, Knotting, Bedfordshire: Sceptre Press, 1977. 150 copies
 * From Snow on the North Side of Lucifer, Knotting, Bedfordshire: Sceptre Press, 1979. (150 copies)
 * Snow on the North Side of Lucifer: Poems, London: Allen, 1979
 * Poems for Shakespeare 7, Bear Gardens Museum and Arts Centre, 1979 (Limited to 500 numbered copies)
 * More Lucifer, Knotting, Bedfordshire: Martin Booth, 1980. 125 copies
 * Sun Before Departure: Poems, 1974–1982, London: Granada, 1984
 * Tides and Stone Walls: Poems, with photographs by Victor Bowley; London: Grafton, 1986
 * Three Poems, Child Okefurd, Dorset: Words Press, 1988. 200 copies
 * Collected Poems, London: HarperCollins, 1993

Film scripts

 * Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) (screenplay based on own novel)
 * The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) (screenplay based on own short story)
 * Counterpoint (1967) (based on his novel The General)
 * The Ragman's Daughter (1972) (based on short story)

Translations

 * Chopin's Winter in Majorca 1838–1839, by Luis Ripoll, translated by Sillitoe. Palma de Majorca: Mossen Alcover, 1955
 * Chopin’s Pianos: The Pleyel in Majorca, by Luis Ripoll, translated by Sillitoe. Palma de Majorca: Mossen Alcover, 1958
 * All Citizens Are Soldiers (Fuente Ovejuna): A Play in Two Acts, by Lope de Vega, translated by Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. London: Macmillan, 1969; Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1969
 * Poems for Shakespeare, volume 7, edited and translated by Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. London: Bear Gardens Museum & Arts Centre, 1980

title: Alan Sillitoe


text:
Talk:Hexagonal

This looks like a dictionary entry. Is this appropriate for Wikipedia? I think it'd be fine for Wiktionary. -Frecklefoot

Merge & redirect with hexagon IMO -- Tarquin

Nothing to merge really, is there? I'm just going to redirect it. --Camembert

title: Talk:Hexagonal


text:
Colin Wilson

Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was an English existentialist philosopher-novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, and (his) purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism".

Early life
Wilson was born on 26 June 1931 in Leicester, the first child of Arthur and Annetta Wilson. His father worked in a shoe factory. At the age of eleven he attended Gateway Secondary Technical School, where his interest in science began to blossom. By the age of 14 he had compiled a multi-volume work of essays covering many aspects of science entitled A Manual of General Science. But by the time he left school at sixteen, his interests were already switching to literature. His discovery of George Bernard Shaw's work, particularly Man and Superman, was a landmark. He started to write stories, plays, and essays in earnest – a long "sequel" to Man and Superman made him consider himself to be 'Shaw's natural successor.' After two unfulfilling jobs – one as a laboratory assistant at his old school – he drifted into the Civil Service, but found little to occupy his time.

In the autumn of 1949, he was conscripted into the Royal Air Force but soon found himself clashing with authority, eventually feigning homosexuality in order to be dismissed. Upon leaving he took up a succession of menial jobs, spent some time wandering around Europe, and finally returned to Leicester in 1951. There he married his first wife, (Dorothy) Betty Troop, and moved to London, where a son, Roderick Gerard, was born. He later wrote a semi-autobiograpical novel, Adrift in Soho, that was based on his time in London. But the marriage rapidly disintegrated as he drifted in and out of several jobs. During this traumatic period, Wilson was continually working and reworking the novel that was eventually published as Ritual in the Dark (1960). He also met three young writers who became close friends – Bill Hopkins, Stuart Holroyd and Laura Del-Rivo. Another trip to Europe followed, and he spent some time in Paris attempting to sell magazine subscriptions. Returning to Leicester again, he met Joy Stewart – later to become his second wife and mother of their three children – who accompanied him to London. There he continued to work on Ritual in the Dark, receiving some advice from Angus Wilson (no relation) – then deputy superintendent of the British Museum's Reading Room – and slept rough (in a sleeping bag) on Hampstead Heath to save money.

On Christmas Day, 1954, alone in his room, he sat down on his bed and began to write in his journal. He described his feelings as follows:

The Outsider
Gollancz published the 24-year-old Wilson's The Outsider in 1956. The work examines the role of the social "outsider" in seminal works by various key literary and cultural figures – such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent van Gogh – and discusses Wilson's perception of social alienation in their work. The book became a best-seller and helped popularise existentialism in Britain. It has never been out of print and has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Non-fiction writing
Wilson became associated with the "angry young men" of British literature. He contributed to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the movement, and was also anthologised in a popular paperback sampler, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. Some viewed Wilson and his friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd as a sub-group of the "Angries", more concerned with "religious values" than with liberal or socialist politics. Critics on the left swiftly labelled them as fascist; commentator Kenneth Allsop called them "the law givers". Controversially, during the 1950s Wilson expressed critical support for some of the ideas of Oswald Mosley the leader of Union Movement and after Mosley's death in December 1980, Wilson contributed articles to Mosley's former secretary Jeffrey Hamm's Lodestar magazine.

The success of The Outsider notwithstanding, Wilson's second book, Religion and the Rebel (1957), was universally panned by critics although Wilson himself claimed it was a more comprehensive book than the first one. While The Outsider was focused on documenting the subject of mental strain and near-insanity, Religion and the Rebel was focused on how to expand our consciousness and transform us into visionaries. Time magazine published a review, headlined "Scrambled Egghead", that pilloried the book. Undaunted, Wilson continued to expound his positive "new" existentialism in the six philosophical books known as "The Outsider Cycle", all written within the first ten years of his literary career. These books were summarised by Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966). When the book was re-printed in 1980 as The New Existentialism, Wilson wrote: "If I have contributed anything to existentialism – or, for that matter, to twentieth century thought in general, here it is. I am willing to stand or fall by it."

In The Age of Defeat (1959) – book 3 of "The Outsider Cycle" – he bemoaned the loss of the hero in twentieth century life and literature, convinced that we were becoming embroiled in what he termed "the fallacy of insignificance". It was this theory that encouraged celebrated American psychologist Abraham Maslow to contact him in 1963. The two corresponded regularly and met on several occasions before Maslow's death in 1970. Wilson wrote a biography and assessment of Maslow's work, New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution, based on audiotapes that Maslow had provided, which was published in 1972. Maslow's observation of "peak experiences" in his students – those sudden moments of overwhelming happiness that we all experience from time to time – provided Wilson with an important clue in his search for the mechanism that might control the Outsider's "moments of vision". Maslow, however, was convinced that peak experiences could not be induced; Colin Wilson thought otherwise and, indeed, in later books like Access to Inner Worlds (1983) and Super Consciousness (2009), suggested how they could be induced at will.

Wilson was also known for what he termed "Existential Criticism", which suggested that a work of art should not just be judged by the principles of literary criticism or theory alone but also by what it has to say, in particular about the meaning and purpose of existence. In his pioneering essay for Chicago Review (Volume 13, no. 2, 1959, pp. 152–181) he wrote:

"No art can be judged by purely aesthetic standards, although a painting or a piece of music may appear to give a purely aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic enjoyment is an intensification of the vital response, and this response forms the basis of all value judgements. The existentialist contends that all values are connected with the problems of human existence, the stature of man, the purpose of life. These values are inherent in all works of art, in addition to their aesthetic values, and are closely connected with them."

He went on to write several more essays and books on the subject. Among the latter were The Strength to Dream (1962), Eagle and Earwig (1965), Poetry and Mysticism (1970) The Craft of the Novel (1975), The Bicameral Critic (1985) and The Books in My Life (1998). He also applied existential criticism to many of the hundreds of book reviews he wrote for journals including Books & Bookmen, The Literary Review, The London Magazine, John O'London's, The Spectator and The Aylesford Review throughout his career. Some of these were gathered together in a book entitled Existential Criticism: Selected Book Reviews, published in 2009.

Meanwhile, the prolific Wilson found time to write about other subjects that interested him, even on occasion when his level of expertise might be questionable. The title of his opinionated 1964 volume on music appreciation, Brandy of the Damned, inspired by his enthusiasm for record collecting, used for its title a self-deprecating reference from the onetime music critic Bernard Shaw. The full quote (from Man and Superman) is: "Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?”

By the late 1960s Wilson had become increasingly interested in metaphysical and occult themes. In 1971, he published The Occult: A History, featuring interpretations on Aleister Crowley, George Gurdjieff, Helena Blavatsky, Kabbalah, primitive magic, Franz Mesmer, Grigori Rasputin, Daniel Dunglas Home and Paracelsus, among others. He also wrote a markedly unsympathetic biography of Crowley, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast, and has written biographies on other spiritual and psychological visionaries, including Gurdjieff, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Rudolf Steiner, and P. D. Ouspensky.

Originally, Wilson focused on the cultivation of what he called "Faculty X", which he saw as leading to an increased sense of meaning, and on abilities such as telepathy and the awareness of other energies. In his later work he suggests the possibility of life after death and the existence of spirits, which he personally analyses as an active member of the Ghost Club.

He also wrote non-fiction books on crime, ranging from encyclopedias to studies of serial killing. He had an ongoing interest in the life and times of Jack the Ripper and in sex crime in general.

Fiction
Wilson explored his ideas on human potential and consciousness in fiction, mostly detective fiction or science fiction, including several Cthulhu Mythos pieces; often writing a non-fiction work and a novel concurrently – as a way of putting his ideas into action. He wrote:

Like some of his non-fiction work, many of Wilson's novels from Ritual in the Dark (1960) onwards have been concerned with the psychology of murder—especially that of serial killing. However, he has also written science fiction of a philosophical bent, including The Mind Parasites (1967), The Philosopher's Stone (1969), The Space Vampires (1976) and the four-volume Spider-World series: Spider World: The Tower (1987), Spider World: the Delta (1987), Spider World: The Magician (1992) and Spider World: Shadowland (2003); novels described by one critic as "an artistic achievement of the highest order... destined to be regarded to be one of the central products of the twentieth century imagination." Wilson wrote the Spider World series in response to a suggestion made to him by Roald Dahl to 'write a novel for children.' He also said he'd 'like to be remembered as the man who wrote Spider World.’

In The Strength to Dream (1961) Wilson attacked H. P. Lovecraft as "sick" and as "a bad writer" who had "rejected reality"—but he grudgingly praised Lovecraft's story "The Shadow Out of Time" as capable science fiction. August Derleth, incensed by Wilson's treatment of Lovecraft in The Strength to Dream, then dared Wilson to write what became The Mind Parasites—to expound his philosophical ideas in the guise of fiction. In the preface to The Mind Parasites, Wilson concedes that Lovecraft, "far more than Hemingway or Faulkner, or even Kafka, is a symbol of the outsider-artist in the 20th century" and asks: "what would have happened if Lovecraft had possessed a private income—enough, say, to allow him to spend his winters in Italy and his summers in Greece or Switzerland?" answering that in his [Wilson's] opinion "[h]e would undoubtedly have produced less, but what he did produce would have been highly polished, without the pulp magazine cliches that disfigure so much of his work. And he would have given free rein to his love of curious and remote erudition, so that his work would have been, in some respect, closer to that of Anatole France or the contemporary Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges". Wilson also discusses Lovecraft in Order of Assassins (1972) and in the prefatory note to The Philosopher's Stone (1969). His short novel The Return of the Lloigor (1969/1974) also has roots in the Cthulhu Mythos – its central character works on the real book the Voynich manuscript, but discovers it to be a mediaeval Arabic version of the Necronomicon – as does his 2002 novel The Tomb of the Old Ones.

Adaptations
Tobe Hooper directed the film Lifeforce, an adaptation written by Dan O'Bannon based on Wilson's novel The Space Vampires. After its release, Colin Wilson recalled that author John Fowles regarded the film adaptation of Fowles' own novel The Magus as the worst film adaptation of a novel ever. Wilson told Fowles there was now a worse one.

A film of his 1961 novel Adrift in Soho by director Pablo Behrens was released by Burning Films in 2018.

Illness and death
After a major spinal operation in 2011, Wilson suffered a stroke and lost his ability to speak. He was admitted to hospital in October 2013 for pneumonia. He died on 5 December 2013 and was buried in the churchyard at Gorran Churchtown in Cornwall. A memorial service for him was held at St James's Church, Piccadilly, London, on 14 October 2014.

Reception
Howard F. Dossor, author of a book about Wilson’s career, wrote appreciatively: "Wilson constitutes one of the most significant challenges to twentieth-century critics. It seems most likely that critics analysing his work in the middle of the twenty-first century, will be puzzled that his contemporaries paid such inadequate attention to him. But it is not merely for their sake that he should be examined. Critics who turn to him will find themselves involved in the central questions of our age and will be in touch with a mind that has disclosed an extraordinary resilience in addressing them." Critic Nicolas Tredell agreed: "The twenty-first century may look back on Colin Wilson as one of the novelists who foresaw the future of fiction, and something, perhaps, of the future of man."

Science writer Martin Gardner saw Wilson as an intelligent writer who was duped by paranormal claims. He once commented that "Colin bought it all. With unparalleled egotism and scientific ignorance he believed almost everything he read about the paranormal, no matter how outrageous." Gardner described Wilson's book The Geller Phenomenon as "the most gullible book ever written about the Israeli charlatan". Gardner concluded that Wilson had decayed into an "occult eccentric" writing books for the "lunatic fringe". The psychologist Dorothy Rowe gave Wilson's book Men of Mystery a negative review and wrote that it "does nothing to advance research into the paranormal". Benjamin Radford has written that Wilson had a "bias toward mystery-mongering" and that he ignored scientific and skeptical arguments on some of the topics he wrote about. Radford described Wilson's book The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved as "riddled with errors and obfuscating omissions, betraying a bizarre disregard for accuracy".

In 2016 the first full-length biography of Wilson, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, by Gary Lachman, appeared. It received a positive endorsement from Philip Pullman, who wrote that "Wilson was always far better and more interesting than fashionable opinion claimed, and in Lachman he has found a biographer who can respond to the whole range of his work with sympathy and understanding, in a style which, like Wilson's own, is always immensely readable." Michael Dirda in The Washington Post called Wilson a "controversial writer who explored the nature of human consciousness in dozens of books" and said that Lachman, a "leading student of the western esoteric tradition, writes with "exceptional grace, forcefulness, and clarity." Brett Taylor "enjoyed" the biography, but said that "a more critical author might have written a book that argued for the subject's worth in a broader and more convincing context. Lachman displays credulity on occult matters and an admiration for Wilson's sometimes dodgy philosophy."

On 1 July 2016, the First International Colin Wilson Conference took place at the University of Nottingham. A second conference took place at the same venue on 6 July 2018. The Third Conference was held in Nottingham on September 1-3, 2023 which included the premiere of the Figgis-West eight-part documentary film series Colin Wilson: his life and work. Directed and edited by Jason Figgis, the documentary is a detailed study of Wilson's life and work which includes interviews with Uri Geller, Gary Lachman,Tahir Shah, Damon Wilson, Jason Figgis, John West, Martha Rafferty and Philip Pullman.

Wilson's archive is held at the Manuscripts and Special Collections Department at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. It contains the entirety of his published work plus manuscripts, correspondence and journals.

Interviews

 * 'Suddenly Awakened', interview for Poetic Mind.
 * Audio Interview by William H. Kennedy Sphinx Radio, 9/28/08
 * Interview by Gary Lachman, Fortean Times, October 2004
 * Colin Wilson's August 2005 interview @ The New York Times
 * Creel Commission Interview with Colin Wilson.
 * Colin Wilson interviewed on poetry and the peak experience
 * Colin Wilson interviewed by Lynn Barber 2004
 * Colin Wilson: Philosopher of Optimism

title: Colin Wilson


text:
List of Danish writers

This is a list of Danish writers.

 * Olivia Levison
 * Naja Marie Aidt
 * Erik Amdrup
 * Hans Christian Andersen
 * Vilhelm Andersen
 * Herman Bang
 * Peter Bastian
 * Jens Bjerre
 * Sara Blaedel
 * Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
 * Anders Bodelsen
 * Georg Brandes
 * Suzanne Brøgger
 * Inger Christensen
 * Stig Dalager
 * Tove Ditlevsen
 * Inge Eriksen
 * Bent Faurby
 * Karl Gjellerup
 * Anna Grue
 * Meïr Aron Goldschmidt
 * Julius Villiam Gudmand-Høyer
 * Thorkild Hansen
 * Johan Ludvig Heiberg
 * Henrik Hertz
 * Peer Hultberg
 * Peter Høeg
 * Jens Peter Jacobsen
 * Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
 * Ellen Jørgensen (historian)
 * Christian Jungersen
 * Søren Kierkegaard
 * Eigil Knuth
 * Birgithe Kosovic
 * Tom Kristensen
 * Lars Kroijer
 * Cornelia von Levetzow
 * Svend Aage Madsen
 * Christian Madsbjerg
 * Peter Nansen
 * Henri Nathansen
 * Martin Andersen Nexø
 * Robert Storm Petersen
 * Henrik Pontoppidan
 * Jytte Rex
 * Klaus Rifbjerg
 * Aksel Sandemose
 * Peter Seeberg
 * Tage Skou-Hansen
 * Jan Sonnergaard
 * Villy Sørensen
 * Pia Tafdrup
 * Harald Tandrup
 * Kirsten Thorup
 * Dan Turell
 * Gustav Wied

title: List of Danish writers


text:
MARC (archive)

MARC (Mailing list ARChive) is a computer-related mailing list archive. It archives over 31 million e-mails from over 2400 mailing lists, with approximately 320,000 new mails added per month. The archive is hosted by KoreLogic, and is maintained by a group of volunteers led by Hank Leininger.

Mailing list indexes includes popular mailing list such as Linux kernel mailing list.

MARC was founded in 1996 to serve as a unified archive of electronic mailing lists, similar to what DejaNews (now Google Groups) did for Usenet.

MARC uses a MySQL relational database to store its messages and Perl to access the data. The archive can be searched for mailing list names, authors, subject lines and full-text of the e-mail messages.

Privacy criticism
In controversy with Right to be forgotten MARC is very reluctant to delete posts upon user requests.

The strict requirements are:
 * On request from an original poster ... that is agreed-to by the list admin/owner.
 * Court orders to remove messages

Mails not conforming to this rules are ignored and not responded to.

title: MARC (archive)