BAGDContext CSM

These images come from a two-volume set of Railway Wonders of the World.

I love the Becher style of straight-up front-on photography in the tradition of the new objectivity.

This is photograph of the stations at King’Cross and St Pancras in London, from about 1935.

Both of the main stations have been comprehensively modernised: St Pancras has the Eurostar London terminus, and a huge new extension, KX has a large courtyard and extension. The StP goods area is now theBritish Library and the Crick Institute.

The bottom-left quadrant is now part of the KX campus, which includes Google, Facebook, Camden, and many other large organisation. You can just see the Regent’s Canal in the very bottom left corner of the image. Cartwright Gardens, the lovely crescent of Burton houses is in the top-right.

From this week’s Guardian, the therapeutic value of watching trains online…I’ve posted before about this, in relation to the noises of distant trains passing in the night.

It turns out that one of the best places to watch the live stream of trains in the USA, is the Folkston gap…this is a relatively narrow space, in Georgia, where all the east-coast north-south traffic passes. So, you get a lot of train traffic to watch.

By a happy co-incidence, I live in Folkestone, Kent.