Here’s a terrific poster, from the 1920s, for the Mitropa long-haul services across Europe.
Mitropa began as a specialist railway catering company in Germany during WW1. The war provided for an enormous expansion of railway services to support the German military effort. The firm effectively took over the German parts of the Wagons Lits services.
After WW2, the firm became a staple of travel across the Soviet bloc of countries.
Since the 2000s, the company has focussed on platform services and has become part of the Compass Group.
We watched the concluding episode of BBC2TV’s, The World’s Busiest Railway…This featured a number of stories about the problem of safety and capacity on the Mumbai railway network.
It turns out that people wander all over the place…on avarage, nine people are killed every day on the Indian railway, and train drivers are inured to the tragedy of the train hitting someone. By the time the train driver can see that someone is on the track, it is too late to stop anyway!
Here’s a picture of a poster, showing a man being hit by a train. They’ve put it up to try and shock people into thinking about safety on the railway track.
I’m not sure how successful this will be…but, I love the exaggerated facial expression on the man’s face. That’s straight out of Soviet era film posters and Bollywood acting.
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.
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).
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’s a terrific poster, from the 1920s, for the Mitropa long-haul services across Europe.
