BAGDContext CSM

This is a just post-WW2 version of the French National Railways SNCF logo. These signs, made of inter-twined letters are usually associated with an earlier period of design. Traditionally, this type of sign is called a monogram.

One of the most famous of these signs is the crest for Glasgow Rangers Football Club. Indeed, this kind of logo is often used in the context of Edwardian sports clubs and schools. The letters look good woven as bullion style blazer badges, or on the fronts of your velvet slippers.

This is the kind of thing I mean.

This, below, is the classic SNCF logo from the end of the 1930s

And, this is the SNCF logo from the 1980s, designed by Roger Tallon. He was the industrial designer who shaped the French TGV trains. Here, he has used the double-line railway track lettering from the monogram at the top of the page. The rounded corners and the italic slope make it a little faster looking…

Here is a great poster from the USA. It’s difficult to do anything really interesting with the classic three-qaurters view from the trackside. Here, there is just enough detail in the radiator, light, and window shapes, to convey the mass of the engine against the flat yellow colour.

I have just found these poster, advertising and cover designs by the American illustrator, Bern Hill. Turns out he’s a bit of a star….

Here are two pieces from a Wedgwood Travel pattern dinner service, designed by the British artist Eric Ravilious. They were first made during the 1930s.

Ravilious was an artist who worked in watercolour and as a wood engraver. These plates are basically wood engravings printed onto china and with colour added.

The image of the train was already a bit self-consciously retro when Ravilious designed them. Nowadays, they seem especially charming.

This fashion shoot for American Vogue by Annie Leibovitz is based on Brief Encounter. I think I know what they were trying for; an emotional intensity…but I’m not sure that worked.

More a Film Noir style, I think.

One of the great railway films is David Lean and Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945).

Brief Encounter is a 1945 British film directed by David Lean about British suburban life, centering on Laura, a married woman with children whose conventional life becomes increasingly complicated because of a chance meeting at a train station with a stranger, Alec. They inadvertently but quickly progress to an emotional love affair, which brings about unexpected consequences. The film stars Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. The screenplay is by Noël Coward, based on his 1936 one-act play Still Life. The soundtrack prominently features the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff, played by Eileen Joyce.

Nowadays, the film seems remarkable for the stoicism and restraint of the protagonists. As the emotional temperature of the film rises; trains thunder though the station. The Freudian potential of railway trains and station platforms is made completely explicit. But, nothing much happens…

Here is a terrific painting by the 20C American artist, Thomas Hart Benton. The painting is called The Sources of Country Music and dates from 1975. It was part of a grand scheme of murals that Benton produced for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

Benton isn’t very well known outside America. His regionalist and figurative style of painting lost out to abstract expressionism in the post-WW2 battle for cultural supremacy.

Benton’s style is overblown for most modern tastes. However, I love the sense of emotional drama. You can feel the paintings in the same way that country and western songs are felt.

Luton Model Railway Club have made a display of the Great Train Robbery (1963). Brilliant. The model is on show at various events throughout the summer. Alan Baines, our BAGD course leader, recently saw it at Alexandra Palace in London.

The Great Train Robbery was the robbery of a Royal Mail train heading between Glasgow and London in the early hours of Thursday 8 August 1963.

After tampering with line signals, a 15-strong gang of robbers led by Bruce Reynolds attacked the train. Other gang members included Gordon Goody, Buster Edwards, Charlie Wilson, Roy James, John Daly, Jimmy White, Ronnie Biggs, Tommy Wisbey, Jim Hussey, Bob Welch and Roger Courdrey as well as three men known only as numbers ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’. A 16th man, an unnamed retired train driver, was also present at the time of robbery.

With careful planning based on inside information from an individual known only as ‘The Ulsterman’, the robbers got away with over £2.6 million (the equivalent of £46 million today). The bulk of the stolen money was never recovered.

After the robbery the gang hid at Leatherslade Farm. When caught, the ringleaders were sentenced to 30 years in jail.

Biggs achieved notoriety by escaping from custody and living the life of a fugitive…eventually living in Brazil. His exploits, over the next forty odd years, were followed by the British media and he became something of a folk-hero. More recently, there have been a number of dramas on British television based on the events of the robbery and its aftermath.

I really like the idea of making a model of a cultural-event like this…next, a model railway layout of Brief Encounter (1945). With integrated digital multi-media!

PS My favorite object like this is the waxwork, in Paris, modelled after Gericault’s great painting of the Raft of the Medusa (1819).

Here are Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941). A train, a suit and glamour. Perfect.