BAGDContext CSM

It’s October, so yesterday, I went to my local Model Railway Exhibition. This happens every year, and I’ve posted about it before. Yesterday, I visited with my friend and former colleague, Alan Baines. It turns out, he’s quite an expert…

Back in 2011, when I first posted about this show, I mentioned several things that seemed to be missing…you can read my original, here

Exquisite Detail (model trains, trees, and realism)

And here is part of the post…

I would say that model railways are probably where fine art was in about 1850! The show acts as a kind of salon where only certain kinds of lay-out are allowed. At the moment the quality of the work and the forms of realism are of a “classical” kind. Digital sound effects are just beginning to make an impact, but there is no point-of-view interaction and there are no film (movement or time) effects.

I think the absence of “cinema” effects is really surprising. Particularly since, as I’ve posted before, there is a long and glorious association between cinema and railways.

Anyway, you can see various groups trying to move their lay-outs to a new level of realism. This usually involves extending the scope of the lay-out so that the surrounding area (context) is also rendered in detail. The thinking is that more detail is necessarily better…It’s as though detail (verisimilitude) is an absolute measure of quality.

But this is nonsense. Think about literature for a moment. It is as if the writing of descriptive passages was thought of as more significant than the writing of character or plot. By attending to the detail, the models miss out on the feelings that are associated with the experience of the railway. Accordingly, the level of emotional realism is actually diminished.

It took years for painting to resolve the traumas associated with realism. This was especially the case after photography case on the scene and hi-jacked the claims to realism that had been implicit in fine art.

I still think that this is the case…

It’s all a bit odd, because all model railways are freighted with powerful feelings of nostalgia and desire. Nostalgia is a sensibility informed by history, delapidation, memory and place…the charm of the miniature and of the exquisite detail simply amplify these feelings, and implicitly make a connection to how we think about desire.

Going around the show, you can see that the people there are desperate…for new faces. Granted, there were a few yery young faces; but there were no female faces. Actually, there were two friendly ladies on the door. Inside, it is mostly white men, of a certain age.

This doesn’t make sense. Women like exquisite detail and the miniature just as much as anyone. There must be Indian model railways. I’ve watched the TV films…indeed, in the recent series about the Bombay railway, there was a sequence at the drivers’ school, where would be loco men are taught how signals work on a massive layout.

I would love to see a psychogeographical model railway…maybe with an essay by Will Self.

By a wonderful co-incidence, Nigel Carrington, the Vice Chancellor of UAL, was a non-exec at model railway company, Hornby PLC.

If I were Hornby, I’d be giving artists a model railway to play with…Jake and Dinos Chapman for starters, and possibly Grayson Perry too. With a book of essays by Ian Sinclair and Brian Dillon etc, and with a short film by Patrick Keiller…

Avtually, Rowland Emett created just this kind of whimsical railway for the Festival of Britain in 1951…part fairground ride and part railway…Ealing Films also mined this territory with the Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). Even better, Hornby issued a model layout set after the film…

And then I found that someone had made a layout with this set…

And that Edwrad Bawden designed the original poster for the film.

That’s perfect…

Here is a terrific poster by Paul Colin for the film, Ghost Train…

I’ve previously posted about the American artist, Thomas Hart Benton.

Benton is part of what art historians call American Scene Painting. This was a cultural group that was part of FDRs New Deal of the 1930s. Artists became an important part of attempts to document and describe the lives of ordinary Americans in the dust-bowl and depression in the US.

This movement also provided an opportunity, across many cultural forms, to mythologise the lives and experiences of ordinary Americans…

The print image, above, is called The Race. It shows the railway locomotive and a horse, racing against each other across the mid-west. The image speaks of the anxieties attaching to progress, and the widespread understanding of technology as a form of disruptive agency…

Perhaps the best known of this kind of painting is Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930). The painting makes the connection between architecture and values explicit. The couple exemplify a kind of austere stoicism founded on religious belief and agricultural self-sufficiency.

These small-town themes are also found in the work of Garrison Keillor, John Adams, and even, to a certain extent, that of David Lynch.

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.

Here are two posters for West End Watches, from India. They make appeal to the punctuality of the railway by association…

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.

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.