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…
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…
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 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.
