There was an interesting TV film recently about the post-war shift from steam to diesel and electric power.
You can watch the film on BBC iplayer, herehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dzzdc/Timeshift_Series_8_The_Last_Days_of_Steam/
And you can find out more about train culture, herehttp://buttes-chaumont.blogspot.com/2007/07/ian-allan-abc-books.html
This film-still shows Spencer Tracy by the tracks in the John Sturges film, Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). The film combines elements of the western and film noir genres. It’s got a terrific title sequence of the huge diesel-powered train thundering through the Arizona desert. You can watch the opening of the film, here
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/293554/Bad-Day-At-Black-Rock-Movie-Clip-Open-Adobe-Flat.html
and you can find out about the film, here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Day_at_Black_Rock
You can tell something bad is going to happen even as the title sequence begins. The train powers along and seems unstoppable. The townsfolk are clearly surprised as the train makes an unscheduled stop. A one-armed stranger gets off…
The film is shot in Cinemascope and processed in Eastmancolor, so it has a wide-angle aspect ratio that does justice to the huge landscapes of the American South West. The Eastmancolor has the distinctive colour palette of the 1950s.
The train in the film is a Southern Pacific.
Definitely one to watch.
This is a post that looks back to the first week of CSM’s School of Communication, Product and Spatial Design Bigger Picture unit. This is a cross-school element for all stage two students.
The unit kicked off with a series of lectures. During the week, there were a number of questions about the relationship between design and the future. Design is a 21C mechanism for managing the material surpluses of industrial capitalism. We can describe the development of the system in terms of a movement from subsistence to desire and from planned-obsolescence to design.
At the same time, the organisation of industrial capitalism requires concentrations of labour and materials. In the early days of the industrial revolution, people moved from the country to the cities because of improved earning power and opportunity. The early (pre-20C) limits on the size of cities was defined by the tendency for concentrations of people to result in widespread disease.
Improvements to water supply, sanitation, housing, transport and communications have each allowed cities to grow. The global economy will be defined, in the 21C, by various mega-cities as populations vote with their feet and move towards opportunity.
In the 21C, the limits to growth are more likely to come from transport issues rather than from anywhere else – the healthcare and communication issues are more-or-less sorted. Accordingly, the mega-city will be shaped by both population density and transport infrastructure.
Generally, transport links will be positioned in a corridor and this will tend to attract development along its length. So, the shape of big cities is likely to become more elongated – we can call this the linear city.
In the UK, the high speed railway between London and East Kent is the first go at trying to recreate the motorway corridors that powered the economies of the late 20C. In East Kent, the time taken to travel to London has more-or-less halved to just under an hour. That’s like picking up Folkestone and putting it where Tonbridge is. In practical terms and over the next few years, the experience of living in Folkestone will become much less isolated and will become more like living in London. That’s if you define living in London as being within an hour of central London.
Obviously, there are many places to look for glimpses of the future. It’s all around us, amongst the architectural and design avant-garde and in science fiction. Vienna, Paris, Chicago and Milton Keynes can all lay claim, at various moments in history, to be representations of the future. Further back there are shining-cities-on-hills and model-communities – diggers and levellers.
If you’re interested in all this, there’s an exhibition at the Royal Academy about efforts to build something different in the USSR.
Remember, the point of design is to change the world.
This is a post about accidents…on the tracks.
A freight train has derailed and exploded in the USA. The BBC covered the story, here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15226940
Luckily no one was hurt. That’s amazing.
I’ve already posted about the idea of safety on the trains and how dangerous they seem to be. Now, I want to consider why we are so fascinated by accidents. They’re always on the news, and it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation to rubber-knech when we see wreckage!
My own guess is that our interest in accidents devolves from our understanding of modern society as a consistent and standard environment. An accident is, whatever the frequency of its occurrence, a non-standard event. Therefore, we are intrigued by it and want to stop it happening in the future.
In part, this interest comes from the trade off between the systemic regularity of modern society, with the associated feelings of safety, and our own feeing that the system forces a kind of regularity, or consistency, of behavior upon us. The accident reminds us of what happens when we misbehave.
A sort of modernist reworking of keeping to the straight and narrow…
This is a post about model railways.
The Folkestone Model Engineering Society held their annual exhibition at the week-end. It was their 40th birthday and they pulled out all the stops…
The show comprises lots of stands with people selling books, models and tools. In the centre of the room there are show lay-outs from all over the country. Prizes are given for best-in-show and so on.
Quite apart from the trains, there are several interesting things to see at this kind of event. My special interest is in the trees. There is a whole sub-branch of the railway model scene which is about trees.
The reason for this is that many people like to make a lay-out of some country branch line, or junction. Obviously, in the context of rural Britain, there is is plenty of scope for trees.
The level of detail in the show lay-out can only be described as “exquisite.”
I would say that model railways are probably where fine art was in about 1850! The show acts as a kind of salon where only certain kinds of lay-out are allowed. At the moment the quality of the work and the forms of realism are of a “classical” kind. Digital sound effects are just beginning to make an impact, but there is no point-of-view interaction and no film effects.
I think the absence of “cinema” effects is really surprising. Particularly since, as I’ve posted before, there is a long and glorious association between cinema and railways.
Anyway, you can see various groups trying to move their lay-oiuts to a new level of realism. This usually involves extending the scope of the lay-out so that the surrounding area is also rendered in detail. The thinking is that more detail is necessarily better…It’s as though detail is an absolute measure of quality.
But this is nonsense. Think about literature for a moment. It is as if the writing of descriptive passages was thought of as more significant than the writing of character or plot. By attending to the detail, the models miss out on the feelings that are associated with the experience of the railway. Accordingly, the level of realism is actually diminished.
It took years for painting to resolve the traumas associated with realism. This was especially the case after photography case on the scene and hi-jacked the claims to realism that had been implicit in fine art.
If you want to find out about the history of art and the 19C development of realism, look at Linda Nochlin’s book.
This is a post about safety and railways. You might be wondering why it’s beginning with a picture of Doris Day as Calamity Jane? Well, at a crucial moment in her career Doris was involved in a a car accident. The car she was riding in was hit by a train at a level crossing… (It’s amazing the stuff you can learn watching TV).
In case you’re wondering, Doris suffered a severe fracture in her legs and it seemed as if her career would end before it had begun. She picked herself up, dusted herself down, and learnt to sing. She did get to Hollywood in the end.
The point about the story is that railway accidents are much more widespread than is imagined. Of course, the big train collisions and de-railments are part of national folklore. In fact, the systemic failure of the usual control mechanism associated with train travel are remarkably rare. The recent tragedy in China is a reminder of how newsworthy these big accidents remain.
In fact, the railways are plagued by a pretty constant stream of accidents in which individuals are injured or killed. Generally, these accidents are caused by human error.
The opening ceremonies of the world’s first commercial railway service, the Liverpool and Manchester in 1839, was marred by the death of William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool. Huskisson had got off the train to inspect the track and was surprised by the arrival of the train. The speed of the machine caught him by surprise and he was knocked down. He died of his injuries later. So, the history of the railways is linked to fatality from the first.
Mostly, these accidents involve people doing things that they shouldn’t. For members of the public, walking on the track and jumping form trains are especially to be avoided. The railway has a more-or-less continuous campaign aimed at public safety.
Equally, the safety guidelines for railway employees are pretty straightforward. Nowadays, we take the idea that employers have a statutory duty of care to their employees for granted. It wasn’t always like that.
Until relatively recently, the railways were such a dangerous working environment that the big railway companies were obliged to provide their own orphanages! I can remember the Southern Railway Children’s Home in Woking. We passed it on our own journey to London when I was small.
These institutions reflected the absence, elsewhere, of any alternative. Before WW2, say, the loss of a breadwinner was catastrophic. A woman with small children would be destitute. It seems inconceivable by today’s standards, but the best solution was to take the children into care! We now understand how often that ends in abuse, cruelty and misery…
The creation, in 1923, of the Big Four railway groups consolidated staff and machinery, across Britain, into fewer larger organisations. This consolidation was initiated for the purposes of economy, efficiency and profit. To achieve these objectives required that uniform standards of performance – both mechanical and personal – be imposed. Part of this standardisation began to address itself to issues of health and safety.
It was natural, in these circumstances, for the railway companies to embrace the potential of graphic design to propagandise in favour of accident prevention. Since these messages only work through constant repetition, the railway was obliged to re-issue these posters at intervals. The result is that we can easily compare graphic styles across the decades.
Here are the kinds of thing I’ve been taking about. The posters are by Frank Newbould, Leonard Cusden and others. There’s also a chapter on safety posters in my book, Modern British Posters.
If you want to get a sense of the thrill, excitement and danger that still attaches to the railway, especially for small children, watch this TV advertisement from Norway…
This is a post about trains and photography; black and white photography; night-time, black and white photography from the USA during the 1950s. This is a post about O Winston Link.
Link was born in New York during 1914. His early training was as an commercial photographer for big US industrial clients. His photographs were used in promoting American industrial power in magazines such as Fortune.
Link was on working in Virginia, during 1955, when he contacted the Norfolk and Western Railway. The N&W was, by virtue of their enthusiasm, the last of the railways in the US to use steam power. Link conceived of a plan to photograph these trains at night, using thousands of flash bulbs.
The technical problems of the set-up should not be underestimated. Back in the 1950s, camera equipment was big and heavy. Working in low light conditions or darkness required the use of big lights. Working with industrially scaled objects, in motion, required short exposure times and massive blasts of light across whole landscapes. Link conceived of his pictures as a conjunction of machine, civic detail and human interest.
The trains are travelling at 60mph. So, you need a shutter speed of 1/250 of a second. To get that at night you need 100000 x 100 watt lights, or 60 flash bulbs. The flashbulbs were wired up into reflectors in series. If one bulb failed, the whole picture was lost!
The conjunction of elements, conceptualised by Link, could be orchestrated with precision, according to the train timetable, but not controlled. So, each shot required careful planning and a some luck too.
Link’s project was obviously about railway engines and steam power; but it was also about the idea of the railway as an industry and a lifeline for the community. Indeed, Link’s images of 1950s small-town America are testimony to the discipline, responsibilities, excitements and pleasures of the railway passing through…
The Norfolk and Western ran from Norfolk, on the eastern seaboard at Chesapeake Bay, inland to Cincinnati with several branches of. The engine works were at Roanoak, Virginia. It’s entirely appropriate that the O Winston Link Museum is at Roanoak. You can link to it, here
http://www.linkmuseum.org/
There’s information about O Winston Link, here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._Winston_Link
There are a number of books, exhibitions and film documentaries about Link too.
This is a post about cinema, the wild west, and trains. There are lots of films about the history of the wild west and many of those films include railway trains. Usually, the train is high-jacked or robbed, or chased by Indians. It’s unusual for the railway system to be structurally embedded in the plot; so as to draw out issues of land-grab, profiteering and social progress. This is post about Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
The western genre has been a staple of the film industry from the very beginning. Of course, it took a view from outside Hollywood to see what “the Western” could be…
The European Western
During the 1960s, the Italian film industry re-invented the American western film. The genre was attractive for a variety of reasons. The first was that, for many Europeans and because of familiarity, the western was widely acknowledged as a quintessentially American form of film storytelling. Secondly, the pared-down circumstances of the American west allowed for a heightened, or operatic, intensity of drama. Finally, the films were attractive to producers in terms of costs because of their relative economy. These films became identified, because of their Italian origins, as spaghetti westerns.
Italian film-makers drew on their familiarity with the western genre to re-cast the western in a more cynical light than their American contemporaries. Film-makers in America had generally mythologised the west in terms of the harsh, but fair, moral certainties of biblical teaching.
The ironic re-invention of the genre became a global phenomenon through the success of Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. Clint Eastwood was cast as the man-with-no-name bounty hunter, Blondie, and was launched toward global superstardom.
The success of these films encouraged the producers to give the director, Sergio Leone, carte blanche for his next project. That project became Once Upon a Time in the West. In the beginning, the film was elaborated by Leone, Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci. The collaboration between these three produced a story with a conceptual and philosophical sophistication that is unusual for cinema. Argento and Bertolucci both went on to have important careers as film directors.
Marx in the West
The story of Once Upon a Time is set against the land-grab associated with the building of the trans-continental railway. So the drama is played out, against the background of money (capital) and technology (the railway and guns) that provides the determining forces for their actions. The foregrounding of these powerful determinants informs the film with a historical, sociological and psychological realism.
In the 1960s, the critical understanding of human behaviour was advanced through the development of social-science methodologies. The revelation, in detail, of the complex workings of modern society was generally understood as informed by Marxist theory and the pop culture sensibility of the Frankfurt School intellectuals. So, the film provides a watershed by acknowledging and foregrounding, in part at least, the complexity of the systems that determine our behaviour.
Every child is familiar with the railway as a system of interconnected mechanical parts. The model railway layout provides for a perfect representation, in miniature and in simplified terms, of the complex original. It was entirely appropriate that the scriptwriters of Once Upon a Time in the West should focus on the railway as signifier of a specific form of social, political and economic organisation.
The Opening (The Train Arrives)
The title sequence of the film is almost half an hour long. Three men, wearing trademark dusters, await the train and form an intimidating welcoming committee. After a long wait, the train arrives. The men are surprised when no one appears. It is only as the train departs that they become aware of the visitor. After some discussion, a gunfight takes place and the newcomer rides away.
The duster coats are recognised as belonging to a local gang. In fact the agents of railway speculator, Morton, wear the coats as a form of disguise. The ruthlessness of Morton is based on a number of personalities associated with the American railway boom and its associated frauds, scandals and mayhem.
The underhand and double-dealing of the railway speculator provides the framework for a film about violence, duplicity, and revenge. You can find out about the real-life dramas of the trans-co railway, here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Railroad
A summary of the film is available, here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_the_West
The duster is a long, loose work coat made of canvas or linen. It was designed to be worn by horsemen and to fit over their normal clothing and to protect it from trail dust. For practical purposes the coat had an exaggerated vent that allowed the coat to be worn comfortably whilst riding. On foot, the coats had a particular flapping gait. In addition the long, loose, coats allowed a variety of guns and weapons to be concealed. Just like the poncho, the coats allowed for the ready and speedy use of firearms. So the flapping duster was associated in the popular imagination, and from its very beginning, with violent and itinerant groups of horsemen.
These specific associations help explain why the duster was rarely seen in the traditional western. The hero, individually isolated, could ride long distances without requiring special clothing except in the most difficult circumstances. Furthermore, the moral integrity of the hero would be fatally compromised by the use of a coat to hide a gun. Lastly, the action of most westerns is played out against the civilised backdrop of town and community. Even the saloon bar setting of many westerns required the protagonists to fight it out in their Sunday best.
At the same time as the first train, and the visitor, is arriving a terrible massacre is occurring. Over at the Sweetwater Ranch, Morton’s gangsters have murdered an entire family, including the children; the McBains. They are gunned down as they prepare to welcome their new stepmother to the home. The arrival of this woman into the family is a sign of better things. After years of struggle and isolation, the railway is coming and the water, at the eponymous Sweetwater, will bring people, wealth and excitement. Sweetwater will become a whole town and community. McBain’s prescience will have been vindicated.
The Ending (The Railway Arrives)
At the end of the film, the railway is shown arriving at Sweetwater. The new Mrs McBain is shown welcoming workers to a feast and with great pitchers of refreshment. So, notwithstanding all the violence and mayhem, the railway is acknowledged to be an instrument of social progress…
The film starred Charles Bronson, Jason Robards and, cast against type, Henry Fonda. The female lead was Claudia Cardinale. The film has a remarkable musical score by Ennio Morricone.
This is my all time favourite film. I’ve watched it many times and I’m still amazed by it. It’s big, and clever, and beautiful. If you watch the film and like it, give Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) a go.
Supplemental Sunday 21st August 2011
The film is routinely described as “epic.” It’s certainly got big themes played out against the big spaces of the mid-west. Amongst the cruel brutality there are passages of amazing beauty. One of these, my favourite, is the scene when Mrs McBain (Claudia Cardinale) arrives at Flagstone Station. The train pulls up, she gets off, and is a bit surprised that there is no one to meet her (she doesn’t know that the entire McBain family have been murdered). She moves along the platform and arrives at the ticket office. The camera moves vertically over the building to reveal the town beyond.
The whole scene is touched by the terrible pathos of what we know to have happened. The amazing music by Ennio Morricone adds the finishing touch.
I’ve watched the film loads of times and have payed the opening sequence over and over. Even after all these years, and notwithstanding this familiarity, the sequence of Mrs McBain arriving still amazes me. The combination of pathos, sadness, and beauty; all combined in image, movement and music, is heartbreakingly moving.
Here’s another view, from my colleague, Steve Radmell, in moving image
Once Upon a Time in the West (Cera una Volta il West)
The partnership here is of course between Leone and the great Ennio Morricone. The sequence shows mail-order bride Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) arriving by train in the Western frontier town of Flagstone. As the camera cranes up and the music swells, oh man, that’s cinema.
You can check out Steve’s cinema blog, at
http://parallaxview.myblog.arts.ac.uk/
Supplemental, Saturday 27th August 2011
The BBC Prom 39 was broadcast yesterday evening. It featured music by Morricone performed by The Spaghetti Western orchestra. You can watch it on iplayer, here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on/2011/august-12/44
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b013rl84/BBC_Proms_2011_Spaghetti_Western_Orchestra/
Morricone is best known for his film music; he’s composed hundred of scores. But, in the 1960s, he was part of a jazz inflected avant-garde. Morricone also performs with an orchestra…
Check it all out on Wiki, YouTube, and Spotify…
This is a post about food, catering, fine dining, and trains. For those of you old enough to remember, the “British Rail sandwich” was a thing of legend – not good. It wasn’t always like that.
This is the dining room of Le Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon, Paris. It’s one of the greatestBelle Epoque interiors that survives. Maybe only the Paris Opera is better…
I’ve posted about French restaurants and railway stations before, here
http://areopagitica.blog.co.uk/2011/04/18/steak-frites-11021581/
One of the great pleasure of trains in France is the high quality of the restaurants and hotels that you find around railway stations. At Gare du Nord, for example, there is the amazing Terminus Nord. This is a classic brasserie style restaurant. That means you can eat at any time during the day. The menu usually comprises the classic selections of shell fish, grilled meats and sauerkraut and desserts.
This is a brochure produced by SNCF (French Railways) in 1954. It advertised all their main-line station buffets. Great store is placed on the regional specialities and a handy map is provided which shows the kinds of produce which can be anticipated.
Anone who has travelled around France will be familiar with this. The good news is that the redevelopment of St Pancras in london now includes a number of excellent restaurants. The new King’s Cross station will also have an improved food offer. That’s certainly an improvement on the usual fast-food outlets and fried chicken shops that you get around UK stations.
Here’s a picture of me about to tuck in to lunch in Paris. This is roast bone marrow at the Europeen, opposite the Gare de Lyon. You can check out the menu, here
http://www.brasserie-leuropeen.fr/bewax/fr/home.html
You can check out Terminus Nord, here
http://www.terminusnord.com/carte/
Both of the excellent restaurants are part of larger groups…Bon appetit.
