BAGDContext CSM

My friend and colleague Stephen Hayward teaches on MA Industrial Design at CSM.

The course has just been awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize. Congratulations to Stephen and to the course team, and to the students…

I saw this railway photograph on the cover of an album by Max Richter.

I love the idea of speed and machinery that is implicit in this image…

Terrific.

Here’s another sleeve. This time, with tradition and technology in pleasing visual proximity. The platform made from planks reminds me of Once Upon a Time in the West (that’s always good).

There was a short film about Paul Smith yesterday evening on BBC TV2. The film was timed to co-incide with the big PS retrospective at London’s Design Museum.

Part of the programme was about Smith showing some of his favourite bits and bobs. One of the things he showed was a trainset in a suitcase. The story is that he used this during meetings in Japan…when he’d reached the point when he couldn’t go on; he’d open up the case and watch the trains go around.

The Japanese loved him for this and everything took off. Brilliant.

It’s October, so off to the Leas Cliff Hall to visit the annual Folkestone Model Railway Exhibition. I’ve posted about this before…

Every year, there is a different selection of big layouts. The best thing I saw today was an old doormat, turned into a corn field! Brilliant and lifelike.

My friend and colleague Dave Hendley, photography tutor at CSM, is travelling in Japan. Mostly, he seems to be letting the train take the strain…Good thinking!

This is the inside of the bullet-train express. It looks like the shuttle in 2001 – A Space Odyssey. Here’s the front-end

The Japanese also have trains that are more familiar in shape

I usually watch the BBC4 TVs documentaries about railways and steam trains.  In amongst the old photographs and film footage, you can usually see a bit of how posters were displayed on the platform and around the station. That’s especially interesting to me.

It’s clear that no sensible person would go around filming or photographing poster displays. Luckily, steam trains are much more photogenic and interesting for most people. So, there are lots of films and photos of station platforms, with their poster displays in the background. Quite apart from the mechanical beauty on show, there is all the romance and feeling of adventure and departure.

You can imagine my excitement when I saw this yesterday…

If you look carefully, the poster, second from right, looks interesting. It’s a railway platform safety poster by Tom Eckersley. It shows how someone could be knocked over or injured by people opening the doors of the train as it comes into the station.

Obviously, this kind of image and message has disappeared nowadays. The doors on trains are controlled automatically and you can’t jump of the train before it stops.

I recognised the poster, because it’s included in my book, Modern British Posters.

It’s always interesting to see the historical context of poster display. This poster is from the very early 1960s. You get a real sense of how different and exciting this kind of graphic communication could be – on a railway platform in rural Wales.

PS

You see some terrific advertising in the backgrounds of early Hitchcock films – often associated with railway stations and esacape.

Here’s a terrific photograph of a streamlined railway locomotive from the 1930s. It’s from a book about the development of commercial photography in Britain during the 1930s. There are groups of images relating to fashion and industrial objects.

There are loads of old photos of trains. Partly, it’s because lots of people had cameras with them when they were travelling – the glamour, the sophistication! But also it was because lots of people like trains!

However, most train photos are pretty much the same…it’s a question of how you can take a picture safely.

From a commercial perspective, the railway train was an excellent challenge. The machine is outdoors, moving at speed and is pretty big. Getting a good shot quickly and so that it would reproduce really well on the page was tricky. This was especially the case in the days of large plate cameras, poor lighting, and slow film speeds.

The commercial photographer was trying to produce an image that could be reproduced and printed in magazine advertising and so on. Even in the 1930s, this was more difficult than it sounds.

The simplest solution was to get down low and  close to the track. The resulting point-of-view managed to make the machine look big and quick; so the image was both dramatic and dynamic, against the powerful diagonal of disappearing perspective.

It still took courage to get a good shot.

These kinds of dramatic point-of-view shots were greatly facilitated by the new, hand-held, cameras of the 1930s. Further afield, the Soviet pioneer, Rodchenko, was the master of these new perspectives in photography.

I’ve posted before about various aspects of railways and photography. You can just check the archive.

Here’s the centrefold from today’s Guardian.

The recent spate of big railway disasters reminds us of the importance of public safety in relation to the machine ensemble. Health and safety issues are a matter of continuous and permanent attention for those working on the railway. The messages require continuous repetition.

You can see, from these workshop posters, that issues of health and safety are generally more prosaic – lifting and carrying correctly, stacking properly and not rushing. The administrative process is designed, in part, to reduce any danger by the application of the correct procedure.

These twelve posters, by Frank Newbould, are from the 1940s. I have other sets of the same kinds of message from the 1950s and 1960s.

Spain

The engine “black boxes” have revealed that the driver of the derailed express in Spain was on the telephone at the time of the crash. Apparently, he was answering a call from his controller!

Switzerland

There has been a head-on crash between two trains in Switzerland. Anyone who is familiar with the railway in Switzerland will know how unusual this is. The land of precision usually runs a very precise railway.