BAGDContext CSM

Here is a painting, by the British artist, Evelyn Dunbar, of a WW2 hospital train. I remember this painting from when I was very small, (it was illustrated in one of our books at home). I think I was fascinated by the idea of a train with beds…which I was familiar with from France; and I was impressed by the terrible stillness of the scene. It’s definitely about the quiet before the storm, and how people find calm and consolation by concentrating on small tasks.

There’s a selection of her paintings, below. I love the technical precision of Dunbar’s work and the dignity she gives every person in her paintings. Everyone is concentrating on the task-in-hand and doing it as best they can – keeping calm, and carrying on!

I’ve written before about the impact of the train on  military thinking…the railway allowed for greater logistical reach and improved mobility. Troops and equipment could be moved about over large distances and at speed. This was crucial in the build up to battle; but it was also important for removing the injured from the front…

One of the basic principles of battlefield medicine is of triage. The military doctors evaluate the injured and sort those that can be helped, from those whose injuries are fatal. The non-fatally injured are then operated on, or moved to a more quiet area where they can be treated. In historical terms, battlefield surgery has mostly been about amputation!

The links between war and medicine are really interesting. The technical development of 20C warfare provided for the urgent development of techniques in reconstructive surgery (WW1), the treatment of severe burns (WW2), and open-heart surgery (post-WW2).

The story of WW1 reconstructive surgery is quite well known now. The widespread use of powerful artillery during WW1 produced a terrible new kind of shrapnel exit-wound. This could leave someone without half a face! At first, medical efforts were directed at simply making sure the wounds healed. That wasn’t easy. Survival and recovery produced its own trauma associated with disfigurement and isolation. Humane doctors began to consider the possibilities of reconstructive techniques and grafts. The hospital at Sidcup, Kent, was one of the main centres for this work. Sir Harold Gillies was the pioneer surgeon associated with this work.

The early efforts at this kind of surgery were documented by the artist and surgeon, Henry Tonks. Some of his work is displayed at the NPG, London, for the centenary of WW1. Tonks was a Professor at the Slade School of Art. In a previous life, he had been the assistant to the great Victorian surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves at the London Hospital. Treves is a very significant historical figure, but he is nowadays mostly associated with the story of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. This story was made into a film by David Lynch (1980).

By a terrible co-incidence, there is a BBC1TV Sunday evening drama, based on WW1 nursing, called Field of Blood…

The technical development of mechanical war on land and in the air, during WW2, provided for many more injuries through the serious burns. These new types of injury were addressed through surgery and salt bath treatments at East Grinstead. The pioneer surgeon at East grinstead was Sir Archibald McIndoe.

McIndoe understood that the traumas associated with injury were both physical and psychological. At East Grinstead, he established a social club for his patients. This allowed them to begin the difficult process of post-injury social integration.

The major problems associated with battlefield amputation were blood loss and infection. New techniques to stem blood loss allowed for surgeons to attempt more complex forms of surgery. During the 1950s and 1960s rapid progress was made so that, by the end of the 1960s, a successful heart-transplant was completed. This was a direct and positive consequence of new techniques pioneered during WW2 and on military battlefields in Asia – think MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) with helicopter support.

The development of penicillin greatly reduced the threat associated with battlefield infection.

I did find a pretty good website about railway surgery, with a page about US military hospital trains…

http://railwaysurgery.org/Army.htm

The site is dedicated to railway surgery; which, in America, is a branch of surgery devoted to looking after railway employees and the specific traumas associated with work on the railroad.

Just in case anyone thinks this is all historical, here is a picture of a modern hospital train in India.

You can see Evelyn Dunbar’s work at the Imperial War Museum, London.  There’s a BBC website slide show of her paintings and there’s a wiki entry. It turns out Evelyn was a neighbour of ours in East Kent. Hopefully, we’ll find one of her paintings one day.

Here’s a terrific advertising image from the early 1960s for the “hi-dome” observation car on the Santa Fe railway. This isn’t just a great advertising image though…it’s an image about a new kind of seeing!

Of course, seeing and cognition and understanding are all connected. So, seeing in new and exciting (technologically enhanced) ways allows us to understand the world in a new and different way.

During the 19C, Hermann von Helmholtz conceptualised the cognitive model of the intelligent eye. This understood the human eye and brain to be connected. Accordingly, physiological, cognitive and epistemological considerations had to be made in relation to each other. The eye became understood as part of a pattern-recognition approach to cognitive formation and problem solving. Later, the Gestalt psychologists constructed a whole theory of psychological development around this idea. I think that this is still broadly correct.

In the early 1970s, John Berger made a series of films for BBC TV called, Ways of Seeing. In the films, Berger unpicked the ideological and political assumptions that support the way we see the world. He revealed that, in fact, there were many different ways of seeing and understanding the world. It’s just that we usually think of the way that we see the world as natural and don’t think about it much. This is always an individual disaster and leads, inevitably, to a kind of false consciousness. This effects people at every level in society and with very damaging consequences.

Peculiarly, Berger didn’t really consider the impact that technology has on vision and, subsequently, upon vision, cognition and ideology. Obviously, and along with photography and cinema, motor cars and airplanes; the railway played an important role in affording people a different perspective on the world.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1986) provides the starting-point for our contemporary understanding of the cultural meanings of the railway system and its mechanical technologies. George Revill (2012.48) briefly describes Schivelbusch’s idea, as follows

the experience of railway travel also shaped the way landscape was viewed…the conventional way of looking at landscape prior to the railway was to observe a receding vista from a static viewpoint, a detailed and closely observed foreground giving way to a more generalised middle ground which guided the eye to towards a specific distant object of interest. From the moving train perspectives were always changing, eye catching focal points in the middle distance were alternately visible and obscured, close and distant, while the foreground whizzed past in a perpetual blur. The speed of travel by railway made it impossible to form such a well-ordered and closely observed landscape in the mind’s eye.

Schivelbusch also connected this insight to the developing 19C spectacular and its attendant ocular entertainments of the diorama and panorama. Indeed, Schivelbusch suggests that the railway experience became the, defacto, optical entertainment before cinema.

These experiences and entertainments provide for a new kind of technically mediated spectator. The subtitle of Schivelbusch’s book is the industrialisation of time and space. The reference to industrialisation is telling and distinguishes an experience that, by virtue of technology addresses the mass of population.

These ideas are described in detail by Ana Parejo Vadillo and John Plunkett who, in Beaumont and Freeman (2007), explicitly link the experience of the railway passenger with ocular formation and cognitive training. The ocular and cognitive discipline implicit in this formation is obviously significant in relation to the requirements of industrial society.

Jonathan Crary (2001) has described how the development of ocular entertainments at the end of the 19C feeds into the interactive and experiential characteristics of speed, acceleration and modernity. Nowadays, we are going through the same process in relation to big data, real-time modelling and operational research.

James Flynn has identified a specific consequence of all this. It is that the cognitive training implicit in this multi-channel and interactive experience actually develops visual and spatial intelligence. This improvement can actually be measured, over time, and in relation to urban populations in developed economies. It is expressed as higher IQ scores.

So, riding on the train, and looking out of the window,  actually makes you cleverer. Glamour and intelligence together, amazing!

Here’s the picture from the beginning in its advert form…

A note about US railways…

The traditional saloon car of the US railroads had open platforms at each end. These provided for open air and panoramic views, especially from the very rear of the train. The bigger loading gauge of US railways made two-storey carriages possible. The raised observation suite allowed for increased comfort and panoramic views through 360 degrees. Each of the major railroad companies had high-rise observation cars during the 1960s.

The smaller loading gauge of UK railways means that these US style high-level observation cars are not practical. Accordingly, the UK observation car is usually a rear-end glazed saloon. Not as practical and not as glamorous.

We continue with our American theme…this is a terrific and dramatic photograph of a streamlined class 3460, 4-6-4 Hudson, by Henry Dreyfuss and Baldwin Loco, for the Santa Fe Railroad (1937). This was The Blue Goose.

By virtue of size and efficiency, these big engines were able to keep going, at good speed, and over long distances. In the days before widespread air transport, these trains provided the luxury express travel of the celebrity and business elites in North America. The Santa Fe linked Chicago and Los Angeles; so the train was constantly used by Hollywood A-listers.

I have a great weakness for colour and scale; it’s what first drew me to posters and graphic design. Similarly with railway trains; I’m less interested in the machinery and most interested in the movement, scale, colour, and typography, of individual trains.

The term supergraphics is usually understood in terms of architecture. The idea of large-scale typographic elements was promoted, in the UK, by Edward Wright (Chelsea) and Gordon Cullen’s conceptualisation of Townscape. The 1960s architectural avant-garde group, Archigram, used supergraphics to animate their megastructures.

The idea of supergraphics was undermined by a general animosity towards advertising and a cultural suspicion of the urban spectacular. British high-tech architects haven’t really embraced the concept either. They’ve generally been unwilling to compromise on material integrity and engineering rhetoric. Only the Pompidou by Rogers and Piano has successfully embraced the civic potential of spectacular.

In the US, they have really big trains. The scaling-up plays to the strengths of the machine-age aesthetic, and the punchy graphic style gives dynamism and flair to the whole train ensemble. It’s the logical end-point of Raymond Loewy’s integrated and streamlined approach to industrial design.

The Cinema-Scope title sequence of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), by John Sturges and with Spencer Tracy, has the streamlined diesel train thundering across the desert and with the titles and credits in monster type…

By a happy co-incidence, the film has just been shown on TV. You can catch-up, online, by using your UAL log-in with Box of Broadcasts.

PS/ These pictures come from a website called curbside classics – it’s mostly cars; but there are some trains too.

I just found this book from 1944. It’s a story about railways illustrated with colour photographs of model layouts. The photos are by Paul Henning, who must have been a contemporary of John Hinde. The book was designed by George Adams and has a few charming illustrations by Patric F OKeefee

The book was published by Collins and printed by Adprint Ltd, who later became Thames and Hudson. It’s incredible to think that the illustration of books by colour photographs was still in its first stage back then.

The book must have been popular – it was reprinted every year for at least ten years…

John Hinde is well known nowadays and is remembered for his photographs for Butlin’s Holiday Camps. Paul Henning is much less well known – anybody know anything about him?

Here’s the lovely endpaper design of the book.

The world in miniature of model railways is compelling – it speaks to the powerful Freudian themes of voyeurism and control. I’ve posted before about some of the meanings associated with this.

There was a terrific documentary yesterday, broadcast as part of BBC4TVs Storyville strand,  called Brakeless: Why Trains Crash…

You can watch it on BBCiplayer, or Box of Broadcasts

The film is described, thus

A documentary film exploring one of Japan’s biggest train crashes in modern history, caused when a driver tried to catch up with a delay of just 80 seconds. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when punctuality, protocol and efficiency are taken to the extreme. On Monday April 25th 2005, a West Japan Railway commuter train crashed into an apartment building and killed 107 people. Just what pressures made the driver risk so much for such a minimal delay?

Piecing together personal accounts of those affected by the train crash, with insights from experts and former train drivers, the film poses a question for a society that equates speed with progress. It offers a fascinating insight into the railway’s role in Japan’s post-war economic boom and the dangers of corner-cutting in the prolonged economic stagnation that followed. Through the lens of this catastrophic train crash, Brakeless considers the ultimate cost efficiency.

John Crace, in today’s Guardian, reviewed the film, thus

Brakeless: Why Trains Crash (BBC4) was something of a misnomer. Rather than being a film about why any train crashes, it was the story of why one Japanese commuter train crashed into an apartment block near Osaka in 2005, killing 107 people. In common with almost every documentary in the Storyville strand, this was a beautifully made piece of television, combining forensic analysis with intensely moving personal testimonies.

The reasons for the crash soon became clear: a fatal obsession with punctuality – not a problem likely to be associated with any British train company; a relentless drive to reduce journey times, regardless of the number of stops or the number of passengers getting on or off the train; a management that bullied drivers who failed to meet their targets; and the lack of an automatic braking system. To put it another way, this train crashed because the driver was running 80 seconds late, thought he was going to get the sack and took a corner too quickly in a bid to make up time.

The desire to make sense of a tragedy and to prevent its repetition is very human. Brakeless achieved all this and more, but such a narrow focus inevitably loses sight of wider truths. Some accidents may be easier to predict than others, but technology and people are not foolproof. One or both will always let you down in the end and when they do, you can only hope the consequences are not so extreme. All the ingredients for a major train crash were in place in Japan long before the Okinawa tragedy. To imagine such a crash will not be repeated is wishful thinking. As long as there are trains, there will be train crashes.

The film demonstrates clearly that the machine-ensemble of the national railway system is a mechanical expression of a society that is accelerating. In general movement is associated with energy and progress. So, speed is positively associated with political economy and social progress. But, there is a brutal cost…

The 108 people who died are simply viewed, by the political elite, as collateral damage.

If you are interested in these ideas, look at Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics, and at the concepts of railway time, discipline, the machine ensemble, and the annihilation of space and time. I’ve posted about all these…

Incidentally, he same thing is happening in relation to the network connection of the digital economy – they’re speeding up. The internet is solid-state, with no moving parts. So, it should be safer; if no less brutal.

Interestingly, all this speed and movement does actually make people more clever. Consider the Flynn effect…

Here is a picture from yesterday’s Guardian. If you think taking the train in Europe is bad…try commuting elsewhere!

Here are some terrific O gauge model engines…

The new edition of the European Train Timetable has just been published. That’s good news.

The timetable used to be published by Thomas Cook; but they gave up on it a few years ago when it seemed that all this would become internet based. In fact, the printed timetable comes into it’s own when data roaming applies and when you’re not really sure where and when you’re travelling.

The timetable is a big seller too. Many copies are sold to people who travel in their heads…

You can read the full story, here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26475256

Styling by Raymond Loewy…