BAGDContext CSM

There are a number of crisis points on the railways around Europe. Macedonia, the Channel Tunnel, and French HGVs, have all experienced tragic accidents as a result of political instability….

BBC2TV’s magazine format look at ‘the world’s busiest railway” continued yesterday evening. There were stories about long-distance sleeper services and behind-the-scenes looks at catering, laundry, freight services and train repair.

Also, featured was the special training given to railway engine drivers – 12 years learning, job-for-life security and above average salaries. Sadly, that won’t last!

I loved the special model layout they use to teach the drivers about the signal system.

In general, the programme is interesting and entertaining…it plays out against a backdrop of the railway, but is really about culture and the system of India. The whole is so much more interesting than its parts.

A bit like what I was hoping to do with this blog…

The BBC are running a series about “the world’s busiest railway.” That’s the Indian railway system. Yesterday’s film looked at various aspects of Mumbai’s suburban service. You can watch the film on the BBC iplayer, or on UALs box of broadcasts.

Here’s the link to the iplayer series page

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02xtt6j

The first film has a great section on the railway lunch food delivery system.

Here is a picture from the front page of this weekend’s paper…it was rather gratifying to see this big US train against its desert landscape…

This is a theme dear to my heart…I’m not a traveller, except in my head. In my head, this ticks all the boxes.

You can explore the sex appeal of trains and landscape and cinema through this blog.

I haven’t found out why they put this ont he cover yet. It looks like it’s something to do with the new Harper Lee novel…we’ll see.

To Margate, mostly to see Dreamland and to visit the not-quite-restored scenic railway. But also, to pop into Turner Contemporary, and to see the Grayson Perry exhibition, Provincial Punk.

In the foyer of the Turner, was an interesting sound-scape piece by Claudia Molitor of Sonorama, and based on the London-Margate journey by high-speed train (HS1).

You can visit the TC website, here

https://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/claudia-molitor-sonorama

and Sonorama’s website, here

http://www.sonorama.org.uk/

I thoroughly approve if this kind of artwork…exoressing feeling through movement, sound, and image.

Top marks for the artist…And also for the train and for its passengers – every journey a story, and every story an art-work. How brilliant is that?

Here is a painting by Richard Hamilton from the early 1950s.

Hamilton is an artist who was associated with the ICA, the Independent Group, and the Pop Art movement of the 1960s.

This painting is one of of a series of pictures that explore the problem of trying to represent speed, understood as a movement through space, on a 2D surface…something that Turner had been trying to do 100 years earlier…

In general, artists have tried to resolve the inherent contradiction between vision and speed, as experienced through the acceleration of everyday life, by representing the fragmentary perception of the world at speed…cubism and expressionism are both possible answers to this problem.

Note. There is not a single, correct, answer to this…nor is there a single, unified and realistic, representation of this experience.

We know from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and from Quantum Mechanics, that science cannot measure two things at once – we cannot know speed and position for example. The same is true of our own perceptions.

The odd thing is that, in these circumstances, the only real and enduring kind of experience is our own emotional memory of it…that is the least objectively reliable, or verifyable, measure of anything. But, it’s the only thing we have.

You can find out more about this painting on Tate’s website.

Here is the centrefold from a project about the development of the French TGV trains during the 1970s. Terrific.

Here’s a small home-front window display poster by the Polish designers, George Him and Jan Lewitt. They worked in Britain from the 1930s onwards…I’ve posted about them before.

This design makes a visual connection between bread, as a symbol of food, and the train, as a symbol of logistics and distribution… There’s a text message which links the distribution to the energy economy of WW2.

All that on a small bit of paper.

Here is a poster announcing the newly-nationalised French railways, called SNCF. The French railways were nationalised in 1938. I’m not sure exactly when this poster was made. I thought 1940s, but it could be earlier. I’ll have to check.

The poster is by Paul Colin, one of the great masters if French poster design. During the 1920s and 1930s he created many great entertainment posters, especially for the American dancer, Josephine Baker. Colin helped to create the dynamic image of Baker.

Colin ranks along with Cassandre and Loupot as one of the great poster designers of the 1930s.

Interestingly, Colin started his own school of design…and taught many of the next generation of poster designers!

Here is a wonderful railway engine from Japan. It was spotted by my friend and colleague, Dave Hendley. The engine is named after the Power-Rangers…and the front of the engine is modelled so as to look like their helmets!

Brilliant.