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
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
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.
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.
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.
Mallard is the name of an LNER streamlined A4 engine. It’s famous for having set the world speed record for a steam engine at 126mph in 1938. They are celebrating the 70th anniversary of this amazing achievement at the NRM, York, by gathering together all the surviving streamliners…
This is actually a recreation and elaboration of a famous poster by Tom Purvis, which shows the four streamliners getting ready…
Mallard was painted a distinctive blue. This, combined with its striking design and technical sophistication, almost made it a rival of the famous Flying Scotsman.
You can see the streamlined engine, pulling the Coronation and crossing the Border Bridge at Berwick, in another poster by Tom Purvis
Purvis gives the engine drama and speed. In another poster, by Doris Zinkeisen, the speed of the engine is rendered as a kind of delirium.
Here is a picture of Mallard displayed at York, so as to show off its smooth-skin styling.
One day, I’ll post a note about the lettering on these engines…
This image, from America and from about 1875, shows three train conductors.
The history of 19C photography is full of non-standard types of image and technique…the first images were relatively unstable and were fixed to metal and glass. That’s why many 19C photographic images have a kind of poetry to them…a sort of mystery, because we don’t recognise them.
It took almost 100 year for photography to become a standardised mechanical process with a consistent type of image and outcome. Optical quality, materials and technologies all play their part in this.
The railwaymen image is a cheap form of photographic image, designed like a carte-de-visite to be carried about like a memento. It’s interesting to see how inconsistent individual appearance was by modern standards. There’s a kind of fashion…but it is a bit all-over-the-place. It’s difficult to tell the difference between good people and outlaws sometimes.
This seems to be especially the case in America – where the size of the country and the diversity of cultural backgrounds would have required powerful normative forces to standardise behaviour. The railway system would have been at the fore-front of driving this consistency across society and the continent.
This image is printed onto thin metal – hence the name tintype – and is as good today, as when it was when made. Metal was more practical than paper in relatively extreme climates and would certainly have been more hard-wearing.
Soul Train was an American TV pop programme that started in 1971. The series grew from an itinerant “Soul Train Talent Show” that searched the Chicago area high schools for singers and dancers.
In the circumstances,t he programme naturally attached itself to the soul underground…
The dancers quickly became as much part of the programme’s success as the signers and bandsmen. A special feature of the studio audience was the opportunity to show moves along a train track marked on the floor…
Reading is a town in England. It is an important stop on the London – Bristol, Great Western mainline. However, this is a post about the activity of reading. So, it’s books on the train.
Roy Porter has described how the advent of the 18C philosophical enlightenment played itself out in Britain through a profound change in the manner of reading. Previously, those that read had tended to re-read a single text, typically the Bible, in detail. This is the idea of textual scrutiny that still prevails amongst scholars. This was replaced, as part of a philosophical methodology, by a much wider reading…
The advent of the railway provided for a new type of recreational reading. The relative tranquility of the railway carriage provided just the type of environment for reading. Furthermore, the act of reading was understood as a powerful signal of “do not disturb!”
From the beginning, newspapers, magazines and books were supplied to entertain the railway traveller. W H Smith founded his eponymous company as railway station kiosks and newsagents.
More recently, Penguin books was established in the 1930s, by Allen Lane, as a way of supplying serious but inexpensive (paperback) books to the railway traveller. Interestingly, it was WW2 that provided a huge expansion in the market for books. The uncertain journeys and long waits of wartime Britain usually required more than one book!
In addition to these practical and business considerations, the railway journey also played a part in defining the form of the modern novel – defining chapters and length especially.
