BAGDContext CSM

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.

This is a French 19C print from Epinal. It was printed in black and white, with the colour added, by hand, afterwards.

Epinal (in the Vosges mountains of Eastern France) was the historic centre for the production of wood-cuts.

These images, cut in a rough and ready manner, were usually of religious scenes or, after the Revolution of 1789, of moments of national import.

During the 19C, the production of popular images, based on the traditional wood-cut, was extended to educational subjects and toys.

Paper soldiers, available in balck and white, and with coloured uniforms, were sold by the sheet.

The arrival of the train in provincial France, during the 1860s, was recognised as a key moment of modernisation.

Images of railway trains and their passengers were displayed as an explicit appeal to modernity.

The major publisher of these popular prints in Epinal was Pellegrin.

English Heritage has announced the listing of a number of historic railway signal boxes across the country. That’s great.

You can read about the story, here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23451290

and there is a slideshow, here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19464080

This is all good news.

It’s important to save these relatively modest industrial structures. They’re exactly the kind of building that disappears without anyone noticing. Typically, they are timber framed and clap-boarded on a brick base. The interesting thing is that the upper part of the box has a large amount of glazing – so that the main part of the box is a kind of proto-modernist observation platform!

I love the fact that, because of where these boxes were put up, they are often the most modern thing around.

Supplemental

After writing this, I remembered that there is a lovely small signal box at Folkestone Harbour.

There are several details to notice about this box…

The roof has a shallow slope and deep eaves, that are supported by brackets. The main windows (now with horrid upvc frames) have small lights above them. These details are similar to many on the listed boxes, mentioned above.

Isfield box, in Sussex, is the one most like the box in Folkestone.

The tragic train crash in Spain comes soon after the crash in France. Over recent months, there have been crashes on India and China too. In Canada, a freight train exploded!

The history of train crashes is almost as long as that of the railway itself. For all of that period, the causes of crashes have remained more-or-less the same; driver error and mechanical failure.

In Spain, it looks like driver error played a significant part in the crash. The crash happened on a particularly difficult curve where speed limits are specified. This stretch of track is also at the point where two systems of track and signals meet.

Amazingly, the kind of drama associated with both freight explosions and high-speed cornering forms the climax of Tony Scott’s last film, Unstoppable (2010).

Futurewise, we’re obviously working towards a driverless trains and a computer control of the infrastructure – a sort of internet of things in relation to track, points and signals.

It’s a big job to integrate the automated and electronic command systems across the railway network – especially if you conceptualise the network as a pan-continental one.

We’re not really ready for driverless trains anyway; it’s too much like a runaway train. The Freudian anxieties attaching to this would be too great for many passengers.

Work in progress…

In the mean time, let’s spare a thought for the innocent victims of these crashes.

In my previous post, I wrote about the prospect of the railway commuter as someone whose behaviour and performance was entirely determined by the timetable of the machine-ensemble and the workplace. Of course the idea of performance is freighted with all sorts of issues to do with economics and ethics; of time and motion; and of success and failure. Also, there an explicit reference to the idea of panoptic control…

One way of exploring this idea is to examine the films of Jacques Tati, or Monsieur Hulot.

Jacques Tati was a French music hall comic actor who elaborated a series of complicated “silent” sketches. These were eventually put together and filmed. For the purposes of this post, you can find the back story, here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Tati

The films are

Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953)

Mon Oncle (1958)

Play Time (1967)

Traffic (1971)

The idea of man as machine also cropped up in my review of the big Richard Rogers architecture exhibition in London. You can read that post, here

http://paulrennie.rennart.co.uk/post/55963054930/richard-rogers-ra

The most recent post on that site is a follow-up post to Richard Rogers. It explores the idea of architecture as “a machine for living.” You can read that post, here

http://paulrennie.rennart.co.uk/post/56146645201/machines-for-living

Which brings us to Monsieur Hulot as an exemplar of “railway man.”

The Monsieur Hulot of “Holiday” is an innocent abroad. The slapstick comedy comes from this character’s inability to engage consistently with the rules and norms of “holiday” behaviour. Needless to say, chaos is never very far away…

In subsequent films, especially “Mon Oncle,” and “Play Time,” Tati looked at the material progress of contemporary life. His films provide a powerful critique of the “machine for living” idea as progress. Indeed, from where Tati is standing, you can see that the ergonomic discipline of everyday life becomes a kind of prison; comfortable, convenient and constraining. The freedom of material comfort is an illusion…

In the old days, the Left would speak about “bourgeois conventionality” as a way of describing the cultural rules that are identified as socially acceptable. It turns out, that nothing is socially acceptable as making lots of money.

I also wrote a post that made a connection between Monsieur Hulot and Jean Luc Godard. Tati is a kind of Godfather for “Weekend,” or “Alphaville;” even though these are dystopian, violent and chaotic stories.

You can read my post, here

http://paulrennie.rennart.co.uk/post/25223934592/jean-luc-hulot

There was an interesting film on BBC TV 4, presented by the detective fiction novelist Andrew Martin, about the relationship between railways and literature. Luckily, many of the books and stories he mentioned have been turned into TV films – so there were plenty of clips too.

You can watch the film on iplayer, here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dwflh/Timeshift_

Series_8_Between_the_Lines_Railways_in_Fiction_and_Film/

or, you can check box-of-broadcasts with your UAL login.

Martin used quotes from Dickens, Trollope, Conan-Doyle, Agatha Christie and John Betjeman, amongst others, to describe the general literary reaction to the railway machine-ensemble. This moved from horror and despair, to the gothic, the romantic, and the nostalgic.

This was all seemed quite straightforward, except it was the wrong-way-around.

Andrew’s point seemed to suggest that it was people and society that moulded the railway system into something more friendly and useful. It was as if society tamed the machine-ensemble.

But, you could also say that it was the machine-ensemble that disciplined society. This is an idea, expressed by Marshall McLuhan who said – first we make our tools, and then our tools form us.

From that perspective, the “railway man” is worth looking at carefully. He’s not the young boy on the platform, or the old guy snoozing in the afternoon compartment – he’s the commuter who arrives at the station with seconds to spare, and waits on the exact same spot for the same train every morning. Who knows, he may even sit in the same seat every day.

That’s a story worth telling…