Plot Summary

Klaassen receives a phone call, and he is happy with his transfer to head the railway line's controlling team. He accepts well his change of job, but when he meets his co-workers, uncultured and rough people, he starts having second thoughts. However, he takes it easy, recognizes that they're highly trained works, and teaches them a number of (flashback) stories of pioneers of the present steam train: the early invention by Denis Papin (1679); the three legendary land-surveyors of Caton Hill; the 1769 experiment by Nicolas-Joseph De Cugnot; the 1813 machine test of William Hedley; the 1829 developments by Robert Stephenson; and finally the grand opening of the first German steam railway line of Nürnberg-Fürth - stories in which man's will to conquer the machine was sometimes met with disaster.