BAGDContext CSM

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…

Night Mail is a 1936 documentary film about an LMS mail train from London to Scotland, produced by the GPO Film Unit. A poem by W. H. Auden was written for it, used in the closing few minutes, as was the music by Benjamin Britten.

The film was directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, and narrated by John Grierson and Stuart Legg. The Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti was sound director. The locomotive featured in the film was Royal Scot 6115 Scots Guardsman, built in 1927. The film has become a classic.

You can watch the film, here

The film has a spoken commentary that describes how the service works…

Crewe Control? Euston Telegraph. One-Five-Seven Postal, left at eight-thirty.

Class six engine, three hundred and forty tons, twelve vehicles…Eight-thirty pm, weekdays and Sundays, the down Postal Special leaves Euston for Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen.

The Postal Special is a fast express, but it carries no passengers. It is manned by forty Post Office workers. Half-a-million letters are sorted, picked up, or dropped, at full speed during the night; or carried on to the morning delivery in Scotland.

Four million miles every year! That bit is shouted out.

Five hundred million letters every year! That bit, too.

Trains from Lincolnshire and Derbyshire connect at Tamworth.

Trains from Warwickshire and Leicestershire connect at Rugby.

At thirty-four points between London and Glasgow postmen wait with local mails to deliver them to the Postal Special. The mails have been roughly sorted, by district. The postmen set up a net to catch the mail dropped by the train. They strap up the mail bags in strong leather pouches. The pouches are fixed to a standard by a spring clip.

A net is swung out from the train as it approaches the standard. The impact releases the spring clip and the pouches are swept into the train. Those letters were posted in Bletchley (Milton Keynes) half-an-hour ago.

Crewe, the main junction for the midlands.

Trains from Bristol, Cardiff, Manchester, Stoke, Liverpool and Birmingham, bring a thousand bags of mails for the north, between ten fifty-seven and eleven thirty-nine pm.

The Control Room.

Expresses are reported at regular intervals.

The scheduled stop for the Postal Special is thirteen minutes. Five hundred bags must be unloaded, a thousand loaded, engines changed, and some of the English crew exchanged for Scots.

North, with a hundred tons of new letters to sort. The Postal Special picks up and distributes the mails to industrial England; the mines of Wigan, the steelworks of Warrington, and the machine-shops of Preston.

There are seven sorting vans on the Postal Special. Each sorter has forty-eight pigeon holes, each representing a town. The packets are sorted separately.

As the train progresses, the names, scribbled in chalk over the pigeon-holes, have to be changed. When a pigeon-hole is filled the letters are tied in a bundle. The bundles are put into a labelled bag hanging behind the sorters. When the bag is full it is tied, labelled, and sealed, ready for dispatch by apparatus, or at the next stop.

The film finishes with a section where movement, image, sound and verse combine. The verse is by WH Auden and gives a sense of what this service means in terms of personal feelings and issues of community. Here is the text of Auden’s poem

This is the night mail crossing the Border,

Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:

The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder

Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes

Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,

Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;

They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,

But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.

Down towards Glasgow she descends,

Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes

Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces

Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.

All Scotland waits for her:

In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs

Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks, Letters of joy from girl and boy,

Receipted bills and invitations

To inspect new stock or to visit relations,

And applications for situations,

And timid lovers’ declarations,

And gossip, gossip from all the nations,

News circumstantial, news financial,

Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,

Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,

Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,

Letters to Scotland from the South of France,

Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands

Written on paper of every hue,

The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,

The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,

The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,

Clever, stupid, short and long,

The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep, Dreaming of terrifying monsters

Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, Asleep in granite Aberdeen,

They continue their dreams,

But shall wake soon and hope for letters,

And none will hear the postman’s knock

Without a quickening of the heart,

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Model railway layouts always seemed to include a TPO set with trackside pickup. Here’s a lovely big tinplate mail coach.

Here’s an image I found on the internet. I’ve been researching Night Mail, the GPO film about the travelling post office between London and Glasgow…

This is an image of an American postal wagon, circa 1920 I guess. I liked the typographic detail on the railway car.

Here’s a railway transparency from the US Library of Congress collection. The library has a group of pictures taken by an employee of the US Farm Security Administration.

Here is a page form the little Railway Quiz book I mentioned earlier….

We’ve been watching a US TV series called Hell on Wheels. It’s basically a revenge and redemption tale set in the aftermath of the Civil War and against the westward push of the transcontinental railway…

The visual style of the film is based on both Once Upon a Time in the West and Heaven’s Gate.

Terrific.

I have a theory that the vast skies, of the American mid-west, drove people mad…