BAGDContext CSM

In my other life, away from CSM, Karen and me run an antique shop in Folkestone. I specialise in vintage graphic design, old seaside posters and so on…

One of our great pleasures is the weekly arrival of the Antique Trades Gazette. This is a weekly trade newspaper that gives you the results and gossip about the auction world. There’s also a diary of forthcoming auctions around the world. Obviously, a lot of this is on the internet; but the ATG still provides a concentrated and specific hit on the world of collecting.

Cologne technical specialists Auction Team Brecker (May 26th) are selling the model railway layout belonging to Josue Droz. This is a complete layout – with track, stations, engines and so on. It’s a thing of legend…

The actual inventory is amazing: the layout measures 96 square metres, it has over thirty different bits of rolling stock and took eleven years to build (18 000hrs). The models are made to 1:30 scale and the layout is based on parts of the Swiss Railway – the Schweizer Bundesbhan (SBB). That’s not co-incidence, the SBB runs like clockwork!

Before you ask, the train set is electric. But my point still stands.

The layout has only been exhibited once, in 1936. Since then, it’s been packed in boxes and was thought lost. So, the discovery of the whole things is a stupendous find. That’s without considering that the large size of the models and buildings, and their early date, make them very valuable. The top estimate for the whole thing is about 100 000 euros.

If you do the maths, that’s about 5 euros an hour for the work of making this by all by hand. I would expect the estimate to be exceeded!

The auctioneers have posted a silly film on the internet of some of this layout. Just trains going back and forth. I don’t know whether there is a plan of the whole original layout. If not, it will take about five years to assemble.

Now, to the point of this story…

The architect 0f this model, conceived as an entirely complete and inter-connected system and entirely scratch built, was Droz. He was a descendent of the famous Swiss horologist (clockmaker) Pierre Jaquet Droz (1721-1790). This connection immediately makes the layout more interesting as a piece of system design.

As well as building precision timepieces, Jaquet Droz was also famous for the construction of complex automata. The history of clockmaking is relatively well known. Dava Sobel’s Longitude and the film, with Jeremy Irons, which described the battle of John Harrison to win the Longitude Prize is well known. It provides a terrific introduction to why accurate timekeeping is crucial in 18C seafaring, navigation and location finding. In the 19C, these issues transposed themselves to railways and the standardisations of international timezones. I’ve posted about all that before.

Now, precision timepieces are a bit esoteric for most people. So, it was important for the clockmakers to provide another kind of example of their work. During the 18C and early 19C, automated models (of birds and figures) became popular. These were an evolution of clocks and the large-scale table-top orreries that show the movement of the planets around the sun.

The conception of the natural world at this time was based on a fusion of Newtonian mechanics and the idea of the ghost in the machine from Descrates. The notion that you could understand all human movement as an interaction of cogs, levers and wheels, made it was a short step to elaborating a model to show this by example.

These automated displays caused a sensation. Nowadays, we identify these kind of human-form machines as androids and robots and describe these systems as cybernetic.

The next development was align this idea of automation to industrial organisation, society and to cognition. This didn’t happen straight away. Let’s look at how this developed

Let’s have a look, briefly, at how this took shape.

The Division of Labour

The division of labour was first conceptualised by Adam Smith (1776) in his Wealth of Nations. Smith used the famous example of the pin workshop to illustrate his point. The division of labour, within the craft based factory, allows for a massively increased productivity of output. The combining, by Smith, of efficiency, production and rational self-interest, provided the template for the industrial revolution.

The Specialisation of Labour

Implicit in Smith’s concept was the specialisation of labour. This is the principle that suggests that, once you have divided up the process, it makes sense for your operatives to specialise. They will become better (more efficient and more productive) through practice. We automatically do this for everyday purposes around the house (putting up shelves, or washing up and laundry, for example).

Command

These organising principles were first made evident at the Portsmouth Block Mill (1796). Samuel Bentham, Henry Maudslay and Marc Brunel arranged the factory so that steam power, machine tools and the division of labour were combined to orchestrate a fantastic mechanical ballet of production. According to this organisation, the rhythms of production were increasingly set by the tempo of the machine. It’s no coincidence that this system was first set up within a military context.

Balancing the productive output of this machinery required the observational control of resources and machines, along with the disciplinary control, by management, of the quality and quantity of work produced through the direction of human agency. In such environments, control and command were observational and disciplinary functions based on military experience.

You can still observe this type of organisation in a well-drilled kitchen of a commercial restaurant in France. Imposing discipline and structure to these proceedings is what Gordon Ramsay does! The team in a kitchen is called the brigade de cuisine and was first organised by the famous chef, Escoffier.

You can find out more about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigade_de_cuisine

Automatic Calculation

Earlier, I mentioned that accurate and precise timekeeping were a necessary part of navigation. The other part required is accurate mathematical calculation.

The tedious and time-consuming calculations required for the production of navigational tables (naval power again) compromised their accuracy. The consequences of miss-calculation were expensive and fatal. Accordingly, the mathematician and logician Charles Babbage proposed the construction of a mechanical computing devices. These were the Difference Engine (1822) and Engine Number Two (1847). Subsequently, Babbage proposed an Analytical Engine (1871). This last device is now recognised as the precursor, in theoretical form at least, of the modern computer.

The machines remained unrealised in Babbage’s own lifetime. This was due to a variety of reasons including scale, complexity, and Babbage’s various personality defects.  The project was undercapitalised from the start. Babbage could not afford to manufacture and assemble the machines himself. Accordingly he out-sourced the production of parts, only to find that there were relatively few workshops with the capacity and precision required. Indeed, there were no agreed standards of engineering tolerance. An important consequence of Babbage’s efforts was industrial standardisation.

Control

Confronted with these frustrations, Babbage applied himself to the design of factory systems. The issues of quality control, efficiency and productivity addressed by Babbage suggested several new (cybernetic) ideas – sequential organisation, branching and looping. These mechanisms allowed for the factory system to begin directing itself towards an optimal level of efficiency. The entirely rational basis for this decision making in relation to the allocation of resources, suggested the separation of problem-solving and assembly.

In this context, the management of the new industrial system was expressed through the concept of control. This was a more sensitive and nuanced than the command structures associated with military organisation. Babbage understood that standardisation and integration were linked.

In its early phase, the industrial revolution was a slightly distant and separate thing from the London political elite. By the 1830s, the success of the industrialists, their wealth, power and influence had made them significant for the political elite. The northern industrial base was assimilated, along with its values of self-help, free-trade and co-operation, through the Great Reform Act (1832). The brutally normative physical structures of school, prison and factory were augmented by a series of cognitive and conceptual standardisations. These were implemented during a remarkable period after about 1840. The new social structures include the standard one-penny letter rate, the standardisation of train timetables by Bradshaw, and the standardisation of engineering threads by Whitworth. Patrick Joyce has written about the normative potential of standards.

By the 1850s, the extension of democracy had engendered a series of normative structures that effectively controlled of the population. Industrial discipline and democratic responsibility were thereby associated in the social formation of the population.

Economy, democracy, identity and observation combine to shape this system for 100 years. The railway is a benign and familiar example of this kind of normative system.

Fordism

The combination of ideas from Smith, Bentham and Babbage and their application to manufacturing led, inevitably, to the increasing automation of assembly. The work of Henry Ford (1908) in motor car manufacturing pioneered this form of industrial organisation (Fordism). Ford also understood that the productivity gain implicit in this organisation would allow the payment of generous wages to his workers. This would provide an additional competitive advantage to his enterprise. In Fordism, de-skillimg and prosperity are unexpectedly combined.

The potential of Fordism can be illustrated through the example of manufacturing the Rolls Royce Merlin engine during WW2. This engine was considered so vital to British military objectives that, after 1940, its manufacture was out-sourced to the Packard Motor Company in the US. The American company suggested a model of assembly based on the minute division of labour and the exact specification of engineering tolerance (back to Babbage).

This manufacturing (assembly) system was developed to address the over-riding urgency of time-constraints in war production. Within this context, there was simply no time to train skilled workers. The American system provided a sharp contrast with the Rolls Royce factory at Derby which was based on a level of engineering expertise throughout the workshop. This had resulted in high levels of problem-solving ability across the factory; but at the cost of lengthy training.

The de-skilling and prosperity associated with industrial assembly had a profound impact after WW2. For the first time, young workers could, under this system, receive wages that gave them disposable income. The emergence, from about 1950 onwards of a distinctly youthful pattern of consumerism devolves entirely from the benefits of Fordist assembly.

Looking and Counting

The observational (or panoptic) control of manufacturing, pioneered by Bentham and Babbage, was enshrined in FW Taylor’s Theory of Scientific Management (1913) and the increasingly accurate measurement of time, motion and resources. The collection of data associated with the production, efficiency and profit of manufacturing processes (not just the financial accounting) is now central to every part of the economy.

During WW2, the co-ordination of allies, services, arms and men implicit in the planning of D-Day for example, required a new level of operational detail. The statistical measurement of men and resources and their logistical tracking was elaborated into a system of operational research. This provided for a management system based on the accurately choreographed movement of men and resources. (Interestingly, containerised shipping came into play during the 1950s and standardised this system acros the globe). The development of computers made the collection of data and the tracking of parts through the system much easier.

The management of systems, predicted by Babbage, became semi automated and led to a new system of integrated and economical resource management. All of this is evident in the automated integration of model railway layouts.

The Droz railway is an early 20C example of the technical complexity and sophistication of mechanical interaction and electrical control systems. The whole of the 20C is there.

I found this amazing post about the Droz automata, here

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

I’ll be posting about the general history of model railways again.

There’s a nice short piece, by Ian Jack in today’s Guardian, about the repeal of ancient laws (and about railways). You can read it, here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/20/ian-jack-abolishing-obsolete-laws

Karen brought home a bag of old photographs that had belonged to her mother. Here is her grandfather; Karen’s mother’s father, Julius Slonim, standing on the platform with a snow covered observation car in the background. Looks like he’s about to leave on an adventure…

Julius was a successful business man in London. He ran an import and export business that specialised in Bohemian crystal. The family was named after a town in Belarus. We think he came to Britain at the end of the 19C and called himself after his home-town.

We never knew Julius and the facts about the older generation, their arrival in Britain and their struggle to get on are all a bit hazy. Anyway, it’s a good job he got out when he did. There won’t be many Jewish people left there now.

He travelled to the USA too. This picture looks like it could have been taken in America. The design of the observation car is typically American. The hat-and-coat combo is a little film-noirish, so the picture could be from the 1930s.

Julius played an prominent role in the Jewish community of the East End. He was active  in the London School Board. The LSB promoted, and provided, elementary education amongst the poorest communities in London. It’s efforts were later incorporated into the LCC.

Back to America…The open platform at each end of the US style passenger cars is typical. Nowadays, we only see it when Presidential candidates embark on whistle-stop tours in the run-up to an election. Here’s a picture of Barak Obama at the back of the train

The idea is that, before the age of air travel, the train could carry politicians to within reach of even the most isolated community. The whistle would blow, and people would gather around for a speech.

You can get a sense of what this was all about from this picture of Harry S Truman in 1948. In an age of blanket TV coverage, the Barak train was more a PR stunt.

Three cheers for Julius.

If you’ve been up late, you may have heard the shipping forecast on BBC Radio.

This is a litany of strange place-names, with weather conditions, announced for the benefit of mariners and lighthouse keepers. If you’re at sea, it’s a practical lifesaver; if you’re on land, it provides for a moment of quiet psychogeographical romanticism…

Like a lot of BBC Radio, it provides a consistent backdrop to everyday life.

This is a handy cotton hanky with the map of the shipping forecast divisions

Obviously, I find the same kinds of associations and escape in the imagery of trains, travel posters and so-on. It’s a short step from trains to boats. Speaking of which, it was great to find a whole box of ship models, including a couple of hearty tug boats. On closer inspection, it turned out these were “waterline” models, scratch-built from cardboard and toothpicks.

A quick look on the interweb thingy and it seems they might even be Bassett Lowke models. Bassett Lowke models were world famous in their day and are a staple of collectors. Bassett Lowke was quite a personality in his own right too. He had a house designed for himself by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The house is in Northampton.

I’m not sure the ship models are quite good enough, but we’ll keep checking.

In addition to the bigger ships, there were two submarines. Great, I can play out the battles of the Atlantic – think of the films In Which We Serve (1942), The Cruel Sea (1953), and Das Boot (1981). In winter, I can even wear my Royal Navy duffel coat.

My favourite models are those of the tugs. These simple boat shapes reminded me of the famous tug in Cassandre’s shipping poster (see header above), with a nod to the primitive painter Alfred Wallis.

Wallis was a retried seafarer who was discovered, living on the beach at St Ives, by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood. They recognised him as an authentic and unspoiled genius. His false perspectives were especially appealing to these proto-modernists.

You can see lots of Alfred Wallis pictures at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.

Once you’ve figured out where all this comes from, you get back to the source – Alfred Wallis (not Picasso).

By a strange coincidence, the connection between boats, submarines and trains will also be evident at Chatham Historic Dockyard, Kent. They have a gallery show of artists who specialise in railway engines…It’s just opened and will be on for a while. They also have pictures from the National Maritime Museum too. Ship ahoy!

This is a post about Herbert Matter and his identity for the New Haven Railroad. Actually, I don’t really need to say very much. It’s all here and written by Jessica Helfand too!

http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=4697

By the late 1940s, the New Haven Railroad boasted one of the most modern fleets in the country — and arguably, what was, in its time, one of the most identifiable symbols in America.

In April 1954, Patrick B. McGinnis became president of the New Haven Railroad. An outspoken and controversial executive who vowed to lead train travel into the space age, his tenure would last less than two years — yet during this time, his artistically-trained wife initiated a program to rethink the company’s corporate image through the use of graphic design principles. Working with Florence Knoll on the then-new executive suite at Grand Central Terminal, Lucille McGinnis convinced her husband that the railroad needed a new logo.

Enter Herbert Matter, Swiss-born designer, photographer and Yale professor whose own education was framed by apprenticeships with Cassandre, Leger and Le Corbusier. Assisted by Norman Ives, Matter developed a forceful typographic pairing of uppercase “N” and H” letterforms that included monochromatic as well as two-color (red/black and later, blue/black) variations. The new visual identity debuted in April of 1955 — exactly one year after McGinnis took office. Matter was named Design Director for the New Haven Railroad a mere two months later.

Matter’s new identity was a tour-de-force of mid-century modernism: restrained, colorful and sleek, the bars of color that graced the long, steel bodies of the train cars amplified their streamlined form. The logo debuted on a series of new lightweight trains, and their formal improvements (which required a series of trains, called EP-5’s, that had a new size and shape) were articulated by three wide horizontal stripes of color. “To add zest, the stripes would not taper and curve but would end in sharply raked angles,” notes train historian Joe Cunningham. “Roof cab and nose top would be black, noses would be white with a horizontal black diamond surrounding the headlight. A wave of the contrasting color would rise to a peak below the headlight diamond. On sides and ends, block letters would form an N above an H, with the colors set off from the background.”

Curiously, it was the color palette that proved difficult to resolve. In order to facilitate its selection, technicians at the GE plant produced two trains, one in canary yellow with black, and the other in a trio of white, black and red-orange. Matter chose the latter which, coincidentally, matched the red scarf, black coat and white gloves that the fashionably-attired Lucille McGinnis wore to the GE plant the very day the newly-painted trains were being presented. “Matter noted that yellow was fashionable but showed dirt,” Cunningham explains. “Mrs. McGinnis agreed, saying the red looked powerful.”

There are a couple of further things to say. The exaggerated slab serifs of Matter’s identity implicitly recall the mid 19C origins of the railroad. The design choice to work with pre-modern and serifed letterforms was in marked contrast to the prevailing typographic aesthetic of the mid-century, machine-age, modernity in the USA.

The engine livery also has an interestingly sharp, dazzle effect. This is  bit like the camouflage patterns developed for battleships during WW1. You can see the geometry clearly on the front of the can units.

Here’s a Matter cover design for Fortune magazine

Matter was also art director and photographer for the Eames Studio and for Knoll. I’ve posted before about the Eames Studio and their films.

Herbert Matter’s name has been in the news recently. The family has discovered a whole garage full of Jackson Pollock paintings.

This is the standard work on Matter at present. I believe that Kerry Purcell has been working on something more complete and up-to-date.

I also found an excellent model site, which is full of technical information about the New Haven Railroad in 1959.

London – Paris – Milan.

The extension of railway infrastructure across huge distances and the integration of services had the effect of accelerating time and compressing distances. This phenomenon was understood and described as a force. The experience of this was brilliant and unsettling at the same time; a bit like a fairground ride.

The railway expresses this mechanically. The machine ensemble is a complex, large and interactive mechanism. Literature and art explore the psychological and visual consequences of this acceleration too. Cubism, photography and cinema each feed from this speeding up of everyday life.

Of course, the most profound expression of this shift in our experience of time was provided by Einstein. It’s no accident that Einstein conceptualized his theory living in a boring city, doing a boring job and riding on trams.

Here’s a lovely diagram of Einstein’s train thought-experiment that describes relativity

I wonder if Einstein ever took the  tram in Hamburg? See my post below, about Dada. Anyway, here’s a picture of Einstein arriving in London.

This is a post about Otto Dix, Dada, collage and trams. Anyone who knows about art and design will know the destination – it’s Schwitters and Merz. All aboard.

This is Otto Dix’s collage of an electric tram. I saw it in a report about a sale at Sotheby’s, where it made over 2million. I love the odd perspective, the letters and numbers and arrow. Best, I love the manic grin of the driver. He’s dangerous!

Otto Dix was a German artist who promoted a form of New Objectivity in painting during the 1920s. In a way, he was painting the obvious hardship and social upheaval in the aftermath of WW1. Somehow, he found a way of making it compelling and beautiful too.

It’s kind of structural too. He makes the misalignments between power, money, prestige and integrity evident. The collage element in this work suggests a nod in the direction of Dada.

The electric tram has a special place in railway history. It’s also significant in relation to art and to the experience of the city. Accordingly, it played a key role in the transformation of collective identity in the modern city. The significance of these effects is hard to judge, especially if you are used to living in the city. However you can track their impact, and over the 20C, by measuring the Flynn effect.

The Flynn Effect describes the phenomenon that metropolitan populations across the industrial world appear to make substantial and sustained gains in IQ scores throughout the 20C. Furthermore, the improvements in intelligence are in quite specific areas. These are associated with spatial awareness and cognitive reasoning.

Living in cities and riding on trains actually makes you cleverer. Amazing (and brilliant)!

Notwithstanding all the usual clap-trap about modern life and hell-in-a-handcart, its pretty obvious that the acceleration of modern life and the patterns of the great machine-ensemble of the city must impact on your cognitive development. Personally, I’m not surprised that it’s positive. That’s the way it feels.

Anyway, back to trams. If you’re a bit unsure about what trams look like and how they feel, check out Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). There a terrific sequence of trams leaving their shed.

The film is the classic day in the life of the city documentary. It claims to be an experiment in cinema and to have abandoned the usual convections of theatre etc. The camera eye, or kino eye, promoted by Vertov was a modernist way of seeing facilitated by optical technology.

The shift in perception made possible by accelerating technology also plays itself out in the fields of art and music.

There’s a new print of the film available as a dvd and with a new soundtrack by Michael Nyman. Another of Nyman’s works is an opera about the time that Kurt Schwitters spend designing tickets and stuff for the Hamburg bus and tram service.

Schwitters is famous for a type of modernist collage art that he made out of the printed paper detritus of everyday life. Sraps of labels, tickets and type are combined to recreate the fragmentary and elusive experience of modern metropolitan life. He called these works, Merz. 

The art practice promoted by Schwitters has had a profound effect on art and design in the 20C. The whole thing became a bit of an industry.

Here’s a picture of Schwitters by El Lissitzky

I got a return ticket. So, we’ll be coming back to tram’s and modern life…

This is a post about railway related ephemera. These things aren’t strictly strictly railway ephemera. They weren’t produced by, or behalf of, railway companies. However, they do show the symbolic power of the railway engine as a trademark or brand.

I’ve got a small matchbox label collection. I love the slightly primitive quality of art direction and the cheap-and-cheerful production values. These come from a mixed album I just purchased at auction. There are tractor images, Swiss road safety labels and a nice lot of UK pub and beer typo lables.

Karen, my wife and fellow collector (we met looking at the same thing), was a bit anxious about more bits of paper in the house. However, even she was forced to admit that the album had a few interesting things in!

This is another post about psychoanalysis and the railway.

It’s about the correspondence between the emotional experience of train travel and the language we use to describe these feelings. So, it’s also post about language.

Both, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud would surely have agreed that, in the end, it is always about words. Or maybe, it’s in the beginning? I guess it depends on your perspective.

You can see what I’m talking about in the picture by Ravilious, above. The landscape, with its evident historical and antiquarian meanings, is used to provoke powerful emotional feelings of familiarity…

Anyway, I’ve posted before about the obvious similarity between train-travel and the slightly otherworldly and detached sensations we have when dreaming. That similarity suggests that we could transfer ideas and interpretations from psychoanalysis to railway travel. This transfer has worked in relation to cinema and psychoanalysis; so, why not?

The point about Freud, as I’ve mentioned before, is that he provides a vocabulary for talking about and describing hidden things. In psychological terms, this is all the stuff that is buried in the sub-conscious. The interpretation of inner-feeling, in relation to environment and experience, is entirely appropriate in the traveller.

I would say that the relative detachment of the railway traveller (from the world through the window) is one of the most singular pleasures of railway travel. It’s all very well, until you see something you shouldn’t have…

There are a number of films that explore the consequences and moral ambiguity of voyeurism. Some of these films even explore these themes in the context of the railway carriage.

I want to use the example of Carol Reed’s great film, The Third Man (1949). There a scene on a fairground ride that exemplifies what I’m talking about.

The Third Man is one of a number of films directed by Reed based on the work of Graham Greene. Greene’s story is set amongst the war-torn ruins of Vienna. Representatives of the victorious powers have partitioned the city. The resulting administrative confusion, along with the inevitable shortages of essentials, are exploited by a criminal underclass.

An American writer, Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton, arrives in Vienna at the invitation of Harry Lime. Matins is shocked to discover that Lime is dead. His attempt to investigate the death of his friend reveals the unpleasant truth that Lime was well known as a racketeer involved in the sale of corrupted penicillin.

The film is divided into two main parts. In the first, Lime’s personality is recalled as charming and compelling. At the same time, the facts of his duplicity begin to be pieced together by Martins.

In the second half, Lime suddenly reappears. His death is revealed to have been another fraud, aimed at escaping justice. Lime attempts to justify himself to his friend before fleeing through the sewers. Eventually, he is cornered and dies like a rat.

The Third Man shares a number of themes with Greene’s other work. The circumstances of war, along with the terrible revelations of brutality and genocide, combine with Greene’s Catholic belief to suggest a world where corruption and original sin are commonplace. For Greene, the struggle against the forces of evil remained largely futile. Greene’s Catholicism retained, accordingly, a particularly bleak sort of outlook.

Perhaps the most famous scene in The Third Man is the discussion on the giant Reisenrad Ferris wheel. Lime attempts to justify himself to his friend Martins by looking down at the small dots of humanity below and asking whether, at twenty thousand dollars each, any of them would really be missed. Finally, Lime suggests that Switzerland, with its centuries of peace and cuckoo clocks, is a poor alternative to the Renaissance of the Borgias. At that point in history, suggests Lime, were combined bloodbath and genius in equal measure.

You can watch the scene, here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZg8a0nqjTE

It is entirely appropriate that, in the end, the fugitive, Lime, runs to the Viennese sewers. The subterranean caverns, reminding us of Pirenesi and by implication excrament, become the setting for the doomed endgame where Lime is hunted down. Lime’s pursuers are implacable. Eventually, they corner him and a short gunfight comes to its inevitable conclusion.

There are several other points that need to be made in relation to this film. The Third Man was a triumph for a young lighting cameraman, Robert Krasker. Krasker devised an art direction for the film based on German Expressionist film-making from the 1920s and from the Noir thrillers, of the 1940s, in America.

Krasker, filming amongst the rubble of Vienna, used powerful directional lighting to create a world of exaggeratedly sinister shadows and weird perspectives. The result was a morally ambiguous and visually destabilising world in which Lime and his cronies seemed all too believable.

The film belongs, through its visual associations, to what may be identified as a NeoRomantic film language. The 1940s reinvention of romanticism was based on the rejection of a form of modernity that has led to two world wars and genocide. This brings us neatly around again to Ravilious; who may be associated with this group.

Artists and poets were amongst the first to find an alternative value in the landscapes, places, feelings and values of particular locations. For many, these were identified as traces of a lost England. For others, the ancient Mediterranean culture provided a route out of the contemporary nightmare. Baroque Vienna, in ruins, became a powerful symbol of a lost civilisation.

Obviously, the ferris-wheel is not a train. But the fair-ground entertainment provides for a kind of ride. So, the analogy holds, and the sense of moral detachment can be applied. Indeed, the fairground is another environment replete with hidden (Freudian) meanings.

In the context of the railway, this Freudian stuff plays itself out through the combination of detachment and voyeurism in the subject along with the implicit contiguity of the machine assembly.

This usually depends on a train traveller observing something, in passing and from a distance (usually another train) and at a particular time. In order for these actions to be intelligible from a distance, they usually involve forceful male protagonists and (unwilling) female victims. That’s the sex and violence.

The point is that trains insulate from any direct moral involvement in what we are observing. This moral detachment provides for a kind of voyeurism. Nowhere, is this more compelling that at those moments in the railway journey when houses back up against the track. The obvious intrusion of this kind of voyeurism is mitigated by the fleeting nature of passing by train.

At the same time, we have a powerful feeling of inevitability. The machine assembly and the rigorous punctuality of the railway system, suggests both mechanical causation and destiny.

Now, this is an idea that Slavoj Zizek describes in his Lacan and Hitchcock (1992) book. The idea originates with Henri Bergson who suggests that something completely new retroactively creates its own possibility – that’s Terminator (1984) or the Matrix (1999). In the more prosaic world of railway travel it’s Sliding Doors (1998).