The reality is simpler: a continent whose railways and industry were, much of them, built with British capital now has banking, telecoms and electricity supplied by Spain.Since the early 1990s, hardly a month has gone by without some Spanish acquisition in the region.
It's a far cry from Walt Disney's eventual home, the vast Carolwood Estate, whose miniature railway became the catalyst for Disneyland and its rides.
In the west of the county lies an extensive coalfield, whose multiple railway lines and many mining towns, paralleling the main M1 motorway, form the principal north-south band of settlement.
Morgan shared control of it with James J. Hill, whose Great Northern Railway Company was a close competitor.
So I am in a cemetery close by, near a primary school and railway whose presence adds an appealing animation to the scene.
It included the gravity-operated funicular of Montmartre, an incline railway whose descending car, weighted down by water, served as a counterweight for its simultaneously ascending counterpart.
If it's tipping down Take a ride on the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway whose tiny steam engines run from Woody Bay station to Killington Lane.
Llanberis Falls is a few hundred metres upriver from Llanberis town centre and Snowdon Mountain Railway, whose trains travel to the summit of Snowdon, which at 3,560ft 1,085mm) is the highest mountain in England and Wales.
The road had been reopened to the public for the first time in years; the British-era railway, whose rails and wooden ties had been torn up and used as bunker reinforcements by the Tigers, was also being rebuilt.
A quintessentially English, poorly educated, working-class war veteran with social and intellectual aspirations, whose fictional address 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam perfectly conjures the aspirant bleakness of London's suburbs (as if Cheam were significant enough a spot to have an East).
