Joan from Arizona: thank you for your letter. How you found my home address, and why you chose to send your 52-word note FedEx, is but a mild distraction compared to your eloquent appreciation of older modes of transport. Yes, it was McLuhan who wrote that the telegram was the first instance where the message arrived before the messenger (“Roads and Paper Routes”), and yes, I was aware of Venturi, et al.’s Learning from Las Vegas when I wrote Kingsway (1995).

IMDb's one-line description of Konchlovskiy's 1985 film about the effects of government deregulation:

Two escaped convicts and a female railway worker find themselves trapped on a train with no brakes and nobody driving.